PhonePe SBI Card PURPLE
KeepA rupee a point on India's biggest payments app — capped by the month, every tier of it.
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: PhonePe gift card worth ₹500 on payment of the ₹499 annual membership 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: 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 #617
Why #617 A point here is a rupee, not the 25 paise the rest of SBI's co-brand shelf pays — so a flat 1% and 3% inside the PhonePe app are real money. It sits where it does because every tier is capped by the month and none of it can buy a seat.
Read this line twice, because SBI's own co-brand shelf trains you to misread it: a PhonePe SBI Card Reward Point is one rupee, redeemable against vouchers or for cash — not the ₹0.25 catalogue scrip that ELITE, PRIME, SimplySAVE and Reliance pay. It is still a terminal currency: no airline, no hotel, no transfer partner. Points are valid for 2 years from receipt.
The take
PURPLE is the entry rung of PhonePe's card, and the single fact that makes it worth reading is the redemption rate: one Reward Point is one rupee here, so 3 points per ₹100 on PhonePe recharges, utilities, bills, insurance and travel is a genuine 3%, 2 points on other online spend is 2%, and everything else is a flat 1% in real money. On a ₹499 card whose fee is reversed at ₹1 lakh of annual spend, that is a straightforwardly good deal — plus a ₹500 PhonePe gift card for paying the fee and a ₹3,000 Yatra voucher at ₹3 lakh. Now the ceilings, because they are the product: 750 points a month on the PhonePe 3%, 250 of that if the spend is insurance; 750 a month on other online spend; 1,000 a month on everything else. Maximum ₹2,500 a month, about ₹30,000 a year, and the top tier tops out at ₹25,000 of app spend. There is no lounge access on this tier — that is SELECT BLACK — the forex is the full 3.5%, and since 1 July 2026 Scan & Pay or online UPI anywhere outside PhonePe earns nothing at all, which on a payments-app card is a load-bearing exclusion. A good ₹499 card. Not a travel card.
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
The waiver ₹1,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹8,333 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹2,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹8,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹14,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹15,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹15,000 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
- 1 Jul 2026 PhonePe SBI PURPLE stops paying on UPI outside PhonePe
- 31 Mar 2026 SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES 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 Reward Point = ₹1, redeemable against vouchers or for cash — a real 1% on ordinary spend
- 3 Reward Points per ₹100 on PhonePe recharges, utilities, bill payments, insurance and travel
- 2 Reward Points per ₹100 on other online spend
- ₹3,000 Yatra voucher at ₹3 lakh of annual spend — flights domestic and international, domestic hotels and domestic holidays
- ₹500 PhonePe gift card for paying the fee, which is then reversed at ₹1 lakh of annual spend
Watch out
- Every tier is capped by the calendar month: 750 points on PhonePe spend (250 of it on insurance), 750 on other online spend, 1,000 on everything else — about ₹30,000 a year at most
- The points reach NO airline and NO hotel — a rupee in statement value is the whole ceiling
- No lounge access on this tier at all; the lounge visits belong to PhonePe SBI Card SELECT BLACK
- Since 1 July 2026, Scan & Pay and online UPI transactions OUTSIDE PhonePe earn nothing
- The 3% pays only on PhonePe recharges, utilities, bills, insurance and travel, matched on PhonePe's own merchant IDs
- Utilities and insurance paid outside the PhonePe app are excluded by MCC and earn nothing at all
- A long exclusion list: fuel, wallet loads, rent, education, government, digital gaming, tolls, jewellery and gifts
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup, and no points on any transaction under ₹100
- Points expire 2 years from receipt
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes PhonePe 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
11 sourced rules · 7 pay zero
A Reward Point here is ₹1, not the ₹0.25 the rest of SBI's co-brand shelf pays, so 3 / 2 / 1 points per ₹100 are 3% / 2% / 1% in real money — inside three separate calendar-month ceilings of 750, 750 and 1,000 points. No transaction under ₹100 earns anything, and the accelerated tier is matched on PhonePe's own merchant IDs rather than on MCC.
- Fuel · excluded Zero points — MCC 5172, 5541, 5542, 5983; the 1% surcharge waiver on ₹500–₹3,000 (max ₹100 a statement cycle) is all fuel gets
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points (MCC 6513), and SBI's MITC adds a ₹199 processing fee per rent transaction
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero points on e-wallet loads (MCC 6540, 6541), which also carry a 1% fee above ₹1,000 from 1 Nov 2025
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · capped 3 Reward Points per ₹100 when the bill is paid INSIDE the PhonePe app, capped at 750 points a calendar month; utilities paid anywhere else are excluded by MCC (4900, 4814, 4899) and earn nothing at all
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹1,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹499 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 PhonePe SBI Card PURPLE earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹1,00,000 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
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?
income, age and the route in
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.
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
7 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
Fee ₹499 to get and ₹499 to keep, reversed on ₹1 lakh of spend in the preceding year. Unlike the rest of SBI's co-brand shelf a Reward Point here is ₹1, not ₹0.25 — but every tier is capped by the calendar month (750 / 750 / 1,000), no transaction under ₹100 earns at all, and points die 2 years from receipt or after 13 consecutive months with no redemption. Rent carries a ₹199 processing fee and earns nothing; wallet loads above ₹1,000 carry 1% from 1 Nov 2025 and earn nothing.
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 The card's own e-kit — the 3 / 2 / 1 points-per-₹100 table with its monthly caps, the MCC exclusion list, the ₹3,000 Yatra voucher terms and the 2-year point expiry
- official Product page — 3 Reward Points per ₹100 on PhonePe spends, 2 on other online spends, 1 on everything else, 1 Reward Point = ₹1, and the ₹3,000 Yatra voucher at ₹3 lakh
- official SBI's MITC — PhonePe SBI Card PURPLE ₹499 annual and ₹499 renewal, waived on ₹1 lakh of spend in the preceding year, with a 3.5% foreign-currency transaction fee