SBI Gold Card (pre-2009)
Cancel₹1,500 a year for ₹30 lakh of air accident cover and a fifth of a per cent.
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
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 for itself at ₹63,000 a month
At ₹63,000 a month — ₹7,56,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,500 gross (earn ₹1,500) against its ₹1,500 fee = ₹0 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 #1072
Why #1072 SBI's flagship before it had a Platinum: ₹1,500 a year bought ₹30 lakh of air accident cover, zero lost-card liability and a fifth of a per cent. Carried, not crowned.
SBI called this programme "Triple Advantage Rewards" and named the redemption menu as "fee waivers, attractive gifts for you and your family and a host of discounts on leading brands" — the posted gift catalogue its Reward Points still redeem against today, at four points to the rupee. It published no rupee value of its own and the points reached no airline or hotel programme.
The take
Before SBI had a Platinum card, this was the top of its own-brand shelf, and the arithmetic tells you what a premium Indian card meant in 2005: ₹300 to take, ₹1,500 a year, and one Reward Point per ₹125 — a fifth of a per cent into a gift catalogue. What the ₹1,500 actually bought was insurance. ₹30 lakh of air accident cover where the plain classic carried ₹6 lakh, ₹50,000 of purchase protection against ₹15,000, and zero lost-card liability where every cheaper SBI card left you on the hook for ₹1,000. Add a free AT&T Calling Card membership, AVIS discount codes and an IAPA membership at 20% off, and you have a card sold on a brochure of travel-adjacent conveniences rather than on a rate. Cash was the weak spot: 40% of your limit, capped at ₹15,000 a day, at 2.75% a month rising to 3.10% by May 2007. SBI blanked this page's own fee rows in 2007 and killed the host in 2008; the ₹299 SBI Gold Credit Card that carries the name on the next site is a different and much cheaper product, and it is on this board separately.
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
₹1,500/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹300 joining, then ₹1,500/yr
Break-even ₹63,000 a month — ₹7,56,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
−₹900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
−₹300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹10,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
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
- ₹30 lakh of air accident cover and ₹2 lakh for other accidents, five times the plain classic's
- Zero lost-card liability, where every cheaper SBI card of the year capped you at ₹1,000
- Purchase protection up to ₹50,000 against theft, burglary and fire for 90 days
- AT&T Calling Card membership free with the card, for up to 75% off international hotel calls
Watch out
- 0.2% — one Reward Point per ₹125, into a gift catalogue that reached no airline or hotel programme
- ₹1,800 in year one (₹300 joining plus ₹1,500 annual), with no spend-based reversal published anywhere
- ₹500 a year per add-on card, where the ₹750 classic charged ₹250
- Extended credit ran 2.75% a month in 2005 and up to 3.10% a month (37.2% a year) from 8 May 2007
- Cash advances capped at 40% of the credit limit and ₹15,000 a day
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup
- No lounge access of any kind — the AVIS, IAPA and Carlson Wagonlit lines are discount codes, not doors
- 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 whole GE-SBI-era sbicard.com/sbi/ shelf went dark in 2008, and the SBI Gold Credit Card that replaced the name on the next host — ₹299 a year, no insurance package, no published accrual rate — is a separate card on this board. SimplySAVE SBI Card at ₹499 is the live entry product.
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 Gold Card benefits page, archived 28-Oct-2005 — the ₹30 lakh accident cover, the zero lost-card liability and the Triple Advantage rate
- official The same card's Fees and Charges page (archived 18-Oct-2005) — ₹300 joining, ₹1,500 annual, ₹500 add-on, and the 40% cash advance cap
- official The same card's Eligibility Criteria page (archived 09-May-2006) — the ₹2,25,000 salaried income bar
- official SBI's own live product catalogue — 67 cards, and no card of this name among them