Paytm SBI Card
DowngradeOne three-per-cent line on a travel tab, and that is the whole travel story.
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: Complimentary Paytm Super Saver (Paytm First) membership on card activation
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 ₹5,000 a month
At ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹600 gross (earn ₹600) against its ₹499 fee = ₹100 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 #609
Why #609 The weakest admission on the board and we are saying so: no lounge, no transfer partner, and one three-per-cent line on an in-app travel tab is the entire reason it qualifies at all.
The take
Here is the honest version: this card is on the board because SBI pays 3% valueback on travel booked inside the Paytm app against a 1% base, and a travel-category accelerator on an OTA is a travel benefit under the rules this desk works to. Everything else about it argues the other way. There is no lounge access — none, on any network, and anyone telling you otherwise has confused it with the SELECT. There is no transfer partner, no award chart, no fee waiver at any spend level, and 3.5% on every foreign swipe against 1% earned. The points are at least real rupees rather than SBI's usual ₹0.25 scrip, which is the single nicest thing here. At ₹499 it is a competent little rebate card for someone who lives in the Paytm app. As a travel card it is the floor, and the SELECT one tier up buys the lounge and doubles the travel rate for ₹1,000 more.
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
₹499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹499/yr
Break-even ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹2,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹5,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹10,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹33,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹55,900 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
- 9 Mar 2026 Paytm SBI Card stops earning on school and education spends
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
- 3% valueback on Paytm Travel, 2% on other Paytm app spends, 1% everywhere else — as points worth ₹1 each
- 1% valueback on UPI transactions, which most rewards cards pay nothing on
- Complimentary Paytm Super Saver membership on activation, renewed free at ₹1 lakh of annual retail spend
- ₹1,00,000 of cyber-fraud insurance cover
- ₹499 a year — the cheapest way onto SBI's rupee-valued points
Watch out
- NO airport lounge access of any kind — that is the SELECT tier, not this one
- No spend-based fee waiver: the MITC prints ₹499 renewal flat, so the fee recurs every year whatever you spend
- No transfer partner — a point is a rupee of rebate and that is the ceiling
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup against 1% earned: every international swipe loses 2.5%
- Wallet loads on any app and all fuel spend earn nothing; school and education stopped earning on 9 March 2026
- Points expire 24 months after accrual, and the whole balance is forfeited after 13 consecutive months without activity
- SBI's own product record carries no online application path for this card — it is sourced through the Paytm app, and we have not verified whether it is open to new applicants
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Paytm SBI Card 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
10 sourced rules · 6 pay zero
The base Paytm tier: 1% value back everywhere, 2% on the Paytm app and 3% on Paytm Travel, paid as Reward Points at 1 point = ₹1 since 1 Jul 2024 (before that the same value arrived as cashback). Same two-list structure and the same "Gaming"-headed government row as the SELECT tier above.
- Fuel · excluded Zero points — MCC 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983; clause 5 names fuel spends and the General Conditions table repeats the codes
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero points — "any Wallet Load (Paytm or any other App)", MCC 6540 and 6541 w.e.f. 1 Jul 2020. Loading the Paytm wallet with the Paytm card earns nothing, which is the trap this card is most often bought for
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points — MCC 6513, and SBI's MITC charges ₹199 + taxes per rent transaction on top
- Government / tax · excluded Zero points — MCC 9311 and 9399, filed under a row SBI's own table mislabels "Gaming"
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.
Not confirmed on sale — the issuer still documents this card but we could not confirm it is open to new applications. Treat any application path with care.
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
5 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
MITC row verbatim: "Paytm SBI Card 499 499" — printed BARE, where the neighbouring Reliance SBI Card, Tata Card and Bank of Maharashtra SimplySAVE rows all carry "(Waived off on annual spends of Rs.1 Lakh or more in the preceding year)". There is no spend-based waiver on this card; ₹499 recurs every year. Add-on cards free. Fuel surcharge waiver 1% on ₹500–₹3,000 transactions, capped at ₹100 a statement cycle.
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 — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Paytm SBI Card T&C booklet — "1 Reward Point = Re 1", 3% valueback on Paytm Travel, and no lounge section anywhere in the document
- official Product page — 3% on Paytm Travel, 2% in-app, 1% elsewhere; ₹499 annual and renewal; Paytm First membership renewal at ₹1 lakh of annual spend
- official MITC — "Paytm SBI Card 499 499", printed with no waiver clause; 3.5% foreign-currency fee