#1059

LG SBI Card

Cancel

India's first appliances co-brand — free for a year with a fridge, and 0.2% after that.

Not valued

no published fee to price it against

Verified · 4 documents

Skip the arithmetic — the board, ranked → · nothing to sign up for

What it's worth to you, after the fee

Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes a fee — every net-value number here would be wrong by exactly the fee we can't find. Everything we can source — the earn rate, the transfer routes, the lounge doors — is above and stands on its own; this card is simply not on the board, not in the calculator, and cannot win a best-of call until SBI Card publishes a fee schedule we can cite.

Why we decline to value some cards, and what it takes to change that →

2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants

SBI Card · Visa · entry

Visa
Not published
Annual fee — no issuer document states one
None
Fee waiver

SBI's "Triple Advantage Rewards" points redeemed "against fee waivers, attractive gifts for you and your family and a host of discounts on leading brands" — the posted-catalogue route its Reward Points still take, at four points to the rupee. Nothing on this card converted them into LG product credit, and they reached no airline or hotel programme.

The take

LG Electronics India and SBI Card launched this in 2005 and called it, in SBI's own words, "India's first co-branded credit card for the consumer appliances industry". The pitch was the acquisition offer rather than the card: buy an LG product, get the card free for the first year, and — for a window in late 2005 — an assured cash back credited to the card account of between ₹200 and ₹20,000 on every approved application, which is the only genuinely interesting number on the whole page. After that it is SBI's ordinary mid-2000s Visa classic. One Reward Point per ₹125 is 0.2%, and it is 0.2% at LG dealers too: the card accelerated nothing, gave no discount on LG products, and turned points into gift-catalogue items rather than appliance credit. A co-brand that does not pay you more at the brand it is co-branded with is an acquisition channel wearing a logo. SBI never published what it charged to renew.

Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel

There is no renewal arithmetic to run on this card yet — and a break-even we cannot source is not one we will print.

the whole desk — what changed, the downgrade, and what we cannot price →

Keep, downgrade or cancel

what we can and cannot price

Not valued. We can't value this card until the issuer publishes a fee — every net-value number here would be wrong by exactly the fee we can't find. A break-even is the spend at which value crosses a fee, and we are short one side of that sentence — so this desk prints no ladder, no crossing and no ₹0 standing in for either. What we can source about this card is under Sources.

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 we cannot price either side 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

  • Free for the first year to anyone buying an LG product — new and existing LG customers alike
  • A late-2005 acquisition offer credited an assured ₹200 to ₹20,000 cash back to the card account on every approved application
  • ₹6 lakh of air accident cover and ₹2 lakh for other accidents
  • Fuel surcharge waived on transactions between ₹400 and ₹3,000 at all petrol pumps by the 2008 terms

Watch out

  • SBI published no joining or renewal fee for this card — its fee page carries only the house-wide ceiling rows, ₹5,000 and ₹1,500, that every other card on the shelf carries too
  • The co-brand paid nothing extra at LG — no accelerator, no product discount, no appliance credit for points
  • 0.2% everywhere, into a gift catalogue that reached no airline or hotel programme
  • Withdrawn — absent from SBI's 67-record product catalogue and from its 92-row MITC fee table
  • 3.5% foreign-currency markup
  • No lounge access of any kind

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.

Route Closed to new applications
Income · salaried not published
Income · self-employed not published
Age band not published

Closed to new applications — existing cardholders keep the card; there is no way in.

You cannot. The LG partnership ended with SBI's old sbicard.com and no appliance co-brand has replaced it; SBI's live shelf sells Reliance and Tata retail co-brands instead, both 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

Full tracker →

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 2026
    Partner major SBI Card
    SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programme
    SBI 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 2026
    Devaluation moderate SBI Card
    PhonePe SBI SELECT BLACK stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
  • 1 Jul 2026
    Devaluation moderate SBI Card
    PhonePe SBI PURPLE stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
  • 31 Mar 2026
    Partner major SBI Card / Etihad Guest
    SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES
  • 9 Mar 2026
    Devaluation minor SBI Card
    Paytm SBI Card stops earning on school and education spends
  • 9 Mar 2026
    Devaluation minor SBI Card
    Paytm SBI Card SELECT stops earning on school and education spends
  • 10 Jan 2026
    Lounge moderate SBI Card
    SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees
  • 1 Dec 2025
    Launch major SBI Card
    SBI 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.