SBI Doctors Card
CancelFree for life, and the first SBI card for doctors that admitted what it paid.
a year at ₹40,000 a month, after the fee
Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for
What it's worth to you, after the fee
Welcome: ₹100 off at The LOOT, ₹100 back on the first ATM cash withdrawal within 30 days, and ₹200 off at Homeshop18.com on a purchase of ₹1,000 or more
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied. Plus milestones, minus the fee. No accelerator credit — the ranking model on /compare adds ~20% of spend at the card's best accelerator, so its ₹ for this card reads higher.
How these numbers are computed — and why the rankings show a bigger one →
Spend tiers, milestones and fee waivers included, at our house ₹/point. Portal and category multipliers can push higher — run your exact number →
Pays from the first rupee
At ₹1,000 a month — ₹12,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹0 gross (earn ₹0) against its ₹0 fee = ₹0 net — at or above ₹0 from the first rung we price. The ladder runs in ₹1,000 steps to ₹1,00,000 a month and ₹10,000 steps to ₹5,00,000; figures are rounded to the hundred, and the accelerator is never credited.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #1092
Why #1092 A lifetime-free card that actually paid a rate, in a currency capped at four points to the rupee. Carried, not crowned: 0.25% and no lounge, and only doctors could hold it.
SBI called the programme "Shop & Smile" and published no rupee value for a point. The redemption menu it did publish — "Gift Vouchers to Electrical Appliances, Accessories to Lifestyle products" — is the posted SBI gift catalogue its Reward Points still redeem against at four points to the rupee, which is where the ₹0.25 comes from. No airline, no hotel, no transfer partner at either end.
The take
SBI replaced its fee-bearing SBI Card for Doctors around the middle of 2010, and the successor fixed the two things wrong with it: the price and the silence. Joining nil, annual nil, add-on nil — three rows of NIL, identical on captures two years apart — and a rate the issuer finally wrote down, one Reward Point per ₹100 into a programme it branded "Shop & Smile". At four points to the rupee that is a quarter of a per cent, which was ordinary then and is poor now, but it beats the nothing its predecessor disclosed. The card kept the one flourish that made the line worth having: your medical qualifications printed on the plastic beside your name. It also carried a genuine 0% fuel surcharge between ₹500 and ₹3,000 at any pump — not the designated-IndianOil-only version the older shelf ran — and a small opening shelf of vouchers. What it dropped is the interesting part: the professional indemnity discount from Oriental Insurance, and the free accident cover, both of which the fee-bearing predecessor carried. Free, but less. The line went quiet after 2012 and came back in 2018 as the Doctor's SBI Card, a fee-bearing product with airport lounge access and professional indemnity cover — which is on this board, and is the one SBI will actually sell you.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card is lifetime free. There is no fee due, no renewal to weigh, and nothing to cancel to save.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
nothing due at the anniversary · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 — lifetime free
At your spend
₹800 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,500 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹3,000 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹9,000 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹15,000 a year at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
Everyday earn plus milestones, with no fee to subtract — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
The downgrade
SBI Card publishes no document naming a card you can step down to, so we name none — an invented product change is a phone call you would waste. That leaves keep or cancel, and the numbers above are the whole of it.
What has changed under this card
- 3 Aug 2026 SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programme issuer-wide
- 31 Mar 2026 SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES issuer-wide
- 10 Jan 2026 SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees issuer-wide
We price what is in force today — a change that has not happened yet is not in these numbers. the full archive for this card →
If you call to cancel
What the bank offers to keep you is the one fact this desk cannot compute. We are collecting those reports — dated, and only in aggregate — before publishing any: an offer one reader was made is not one you are owed. Called about this card? Tell us what they offered →
The desk publishes subscribable .ics feeds for the dates it knows — offer deadlines, devaluations, expiry audits. Your renewal date is not one of them: only your statement knows it.
What's good
- Lifetime free — joining, annual and add-on fees all NIL, on captures two years apart
- The card was personalised with the holder's medical qualifications, not just their name
- 0% fuel surcharge on any transaction between ₹500 and ₹3,000, at all petrol pumps rather than a named chain
- A published rate at last: 1 Reward Point per ₹100 into SBI's "Shop & Smile" catalogue
Watch out
- 0.25%, in a currency fixed at four points to the rupee that reaches no airline and no hotel
- Redeeming cost ₹99 plus tax per request — on a 0.25% card that is a lot of spend to earn back
- It LOST benefits its fee-bearing predecessor had: no professional indemnity discount and no free accident cover appear on either capture
- Extended credit ran up to 3.35% a month (40.2% a year) from the transaction date
- Cash advances up to 80% of the credit limit, at the same 3.35% a month from the date of withdrawal
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup
- No lounge access of any kind, and no insurance block on either capture
- Withdrawn — absent from SBI's 67-record live product catalogue and from its 92-row MITC fee table
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes SBI Reward Points into a programme that publishes an award chart. These points buy catalogue and portal redemptions, not award seats — so this page has no flight to show you, and will not invent one.
what the cards that DO reach a chart can fly — 2,196 corridors priced →
Lounge access
0 of 793 tracked doors
No lounge access. This card opens exactly 0 of 793 tracked lounge doors — board with the crowd, or find a card that doesn't →
Can you get it?
the route in — no cutoffs published
The cutoffs and the actual route in — not the "apply now" button, the door that opens.
Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.
You cannot. The page stops being captured after August 2012 and the name is in none of SBI's later catalogues. SBI's live card for the profession is the Doctor's SBI Card — a fee-bearing product, launched seven years later, that carries airport lounge access and professional indemnity cover. It is on this board.
SBI Card publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
no MITC row researched for this card yet · filter the board by what you can get →
What's changed for this card
8 dated changes
Devaluations and buffs that touch this card directly, its issuer, or the points and programs it earns and transfers to. Every one is dated here; the tracker carries each one's before → after and the write-up.
- 3 Aug 2026SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programmeSBI Card Travel Credits transferred 1:1 into Etihad Guest, one of eighteen airline partners in §3 of the MILES rewards T&C. At the ₹1/partner-mile anchor that was a full-value exit, and it was the only route left after the two Etihad Guest SBI co-brands were retired. → No Etihad route at all. The MILES rewards T&C now lists seventeen airline partners and Etihad is not one of them — the word does not appear anywhere in the seven-page document. Every other SBI partner survives at the same ratio.
SBI Card's own MILES rewards T&C, re-fetched on 22 August 2026 and carrying a 3 August 2026 ModDate inside the PDF, has one fewer airline in it than the edition this desk read on 2 August. The deletion is provable from the numbering rather than from absence alone: the table's first seven rows are unchanged (Air Canada 3, Air France-KLM 4, Air India 5, British Airways 6, Cathay 7), and every row from position eight onward has moved up exactly one — Thai from 14 to 13, Qantas from 17 to 16. Position eight was Etihad Airways / Etihad Guest / 1:1. All twenty-four other partners we carry, airline and hotel, are still there at the same ratios, so this is Etihad being dropped and not SBI narrowing transfers. The timing matters more than the ratio. SBI phased out the Etihad Guest SBI and Etihad Guest SBI Premier cards from December 2025 and reissued holders onto MILES products, and the transfer route was what made that migration survivable — a Premier holder who had spent six years earning Etihad miles could keep feeding the same account through Travel Credits. That is now closed, and India's remaining pipes into Etihad Guest run through BOBCARD's Etihad co-brands, not through SBI. If you hold SBI Travel Credits earmarked for an Abu Dhabi business seat, they are Aeroplan, Flying Blue, Avios or Maharaja points now. ON THE DATE: SBI publishes no notice and no cut-off. The date here is the day the desk read the change out of SBI's own document; the PDF's internal ModDate puts the edition at 3 August 2026, which is the earliest day we can prove, not an announcement.
- 1 Jul 2026PhonePe SBI SELECT BLACK stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
- 1 Jul 2026PhonePe SBI PURPLE stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
- 31 Mar 2026SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES
- 9 Mar 2026Paytm SBI Card stops earning on school and education spends
- 9 Mar 2026Paytm SBI Card SELECT stops earning on school and education spends
- 10 Jan 2026SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees
- 1 Dec 2025SBI discontinues the OLA Money card and moves holders onto a house card
Every SBI Card change we've dated → 19 events since 1998, 13 of them nerfs — worst year 2025.
Verified against SBI Card's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official SBI Card's own SBI Doctors Card page, archived 03-Jul-2010 — three NIL fee rows, the 1-point-per-₹100 Shop & Smile rate and the qualification personalisation
- official The last capture of the same page, two years later (03-Aug-2012) — every fee row and the earn rate unchanged
- official The predecessor's fee page in its last month (archived 24-Jun-2010) — the handover that separates this card from the fee-bearing SBI Card for Doctors
- official SBI's own live product catalogue — 67 cards, and no SBI Doctors Card among them