SBI Card ELITE
KeepCashback in a points costume — but the lounge-and-forex card underneath is real.
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: e-Gift voucher worth ₹5,000 (Yatra, Bata/Hush Puppies, Pantaloons, Aditya Birla Fashion, Shoppers Stop) on joining-fee payment
Priced on the everyday mix — 30% groceries · 10% utilities · 20% travel · 6% fuel · 34% everything else — with this card's published category rules applied: it earns nothing on fuel here, so that spend is dropped, not paid at the headline, and stops pacing milestones and the waiver. 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 for itself at ₹36,000 a month
At ₹36,000 a month — ₹4,32,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹7,000 gross (earn ₹2,000 + milestones ₹5,000) against its ₹4,999 fee = ₹2,000 net — the first rung at or above ₹0. 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 #112
Why #112 Ranked on travel utility, not points: 1.99% forex plus 14 lounge entries a year carry it, while a fixed ₹0.25 currency with zero airline partners caps how high a valuations desk can put it.
The take
ELITE is a lounge card that hands you points as an afterthought, and the points are the worst thing about it: 2 RP per ₹100 is 0.5% at SBI's fixed 4-RP-to-a-rupee catalogue, and they move to exactly zero airline or hotel programmes. What ₹4,999 actually buys is 1.99% foreign-currency markup — the lowest SBI charges outside its MILES range — eight domestic lounge visits, six Priority Pass entries abroad, and 50,000 bonus points worth ₹12,500 if you push ₹8 lakh through it. Read it as a travel-friction remover with a statement-credit rebate attached and it earns its keep. Read it as a miles card and you have bought the wrong SBI card; MILES ELITE costs the same fee.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
Here is the fee, the spend that clears it, and everything that has moved under this card since you last decided.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹4,999/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹4,999/yr
The waiver ₹10,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹83,333 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹36,000 a month — ₹4,32,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
−₹3,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹6,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹18,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹29,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹40,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
Everyday earn plus milestones, minus the fee — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
Your copy of this card
You hold this card.
Kept on this device, in your browser. It is never sent to us, never synced, and nothing else on the site reads it yet.
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
- 1.99% forex markup — SBI's lowest outside the MILES range
- 8 domestic lounge visits a year (2 per quarter) + 6 international Priority Pass visits (max 2 per quarter)
- 50,000 bonus RP a year (₹12,500) across ₹3L / ₹4L / ₹5L / ₹8L annual-spend milestones
- ₹5,000 welcome e-gift voucher; renewal fee reversed at ₹10L annual spend
- Complimentary 1-year Club ITC Silver tier, plus movie tickets worth ₹6,000 a year
Watch out
- Reward Points are fixed at 4 RP = ₹1 and transfer to NO airline or hotel programme — there is no award-ticket path here
- 0.5% base earn; even the 5X dining / departmental-store / grocery rate lands at 2.5%
- ₹10 lakh a year to dodge the ₹4,999 renewal — the steepest waiver bar in SBI's lifestyle range
- Fuel spends earn nothing at all
- Priority Pass visits past the free 6 cost US$27 + tax each, the free ones cap at 2 a quarter, and the membership itself is complimentary for 2 years only
- The old Club Vistara and Trident Privilege tie-ups are gone from SBI's current sheet — Club ITC Silver is what's on the card today
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 →
What earns, what doesn't
11 sourced rules · 5 pay zero
2 Reward Points per ₹100 base at 4 points to the rupee = 0.5%, and 10 per ₹100 on dining, departmental stores and groceries. The card's own booklet excludes fuel and then hands off — "for other exclusions, please refer to the Shop-and-Smile Rewards Program" — so the rows below are sourced to THAT register plus the dated card lists it links, which name "SBI Card ELITE" explicitly. Accelerated points cap at 10,000 a calendar month, after which accelerated categories drop back to the 2-point base.
- Fuel · excluded Zero points — MCC 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983, named in the card's own booklet and again in the program-wide register
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points — MCC 6513, discontinued w.e.f. 1 Apr 2024; SBI's list for that date names "SBI Card Elite" outright. The MITC charges ₹199 + taxes per rent transaction on top
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero points — e-wallet loading under MCC 6540 and 6541, w.e.f. 1 Jul 2020
- Government / tax · excluded Zero points — MCC 9399 and 9311, discontinued w.e.f. 1 Jun 2024; SBI's list for that date names "SBI Card ELITE"
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹10,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹4,999 fee. A different question from the one above — earning points and counting toward a threshold are separate rules, and issuers write them separately.
Not published. SBI Card states what the SBI Card ELITE earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹10,00,000 bar. We won't guess it from the earn table or from a sibling card: Axis published three cards' rules on one day and all three lists differed. If you hold this card and have it in writing from the issuer, send us the document and we'll source it.
Lounge access
735 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: Priority Pass membership complimentary for the first 2 years only
Opens 735 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 294 airports , via Mastercard India, Visa, Priority Pass India, Priority Pass Global — see the full map →
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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
SBI also white-labels ELITE through five partner banks — Bank of Maharashtra, Punjab & Sind, UCO, Karur Vysya and Central Bank of India — and those are branch-sold only, with no online application. If one of them sold you a card called "ELITE", this page is your card: SBI's own product records and the bank-wide MITC give all five the same ₹4,999 fee, the same ₹10 lakh renewal waiver, the same 1.99% forex, the same 8 domestic and 6 Priority Pass visits, the same 5X categories and the same milestone ladder. Different logo, identical card — so we rank it once rather than six times.
SBI Card publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
per the official SBI Card MITC — figures marked (community) aren't in the PDF; the issuer won't say · filter the board by what you can get →
The fine print
6 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
Fee ₹4,999 joining and renewal, reversed on ₹10L preceding-year spend (MITC + Key Fact Statement). ELITE is one of only five SBI products on the 1.99% foreign-currency tier (with AURUM, Prime NRI Secured, Tata Neu Infinity and MILES ELITE) — every other SBI card pays 3.5%. Utility payments above ₹50,000 a cycle attract a 1% fee. Interest-free period 20–50 days.
per the official SBI Card MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
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 — 9 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — 5X on dining/departmental stores/grocery and 2 RP per ₹100 otherwise (fuel excluded), 4 RP = ₹1
- official SBI's own product record behind the ELITE page — "Annual Fee: Rs. 4,999 + taxes"
- official Bank of Maharashtra SBI Card ELITE — one of five partner-bank editions carrying identical fee, forex, lounge and earn
- official MITC — ₹4,999 joining/renewal, waived at ₹10L preceding-year spend
- official Key Fact Statement — fee and waiver table
- official Airport Lounge Access — participating domestic lounge lists (w.e.f. 10 Jan 2026)
- community CardInsider review (note: still lists the retired Club Vistara / Trident Privilege perks)
- official Allahabad Bank SBI Card ELITE product page (archived 09-Jul-2019) — ₹4,999 joining and renewal, the same ₹5,000 welcome voucher, 50,000 milestone points and 1.99% forex as this card
- official SBI Card ELITE American Express edition (archived 24-Nov-2020) — the same ₹4,999 fee, welcome voucher, milestones and 1.99% forex as the Visa and Mastercard issues