PhonePe SBI Card SELECT BLACK
Downgrade1 RP = ₹1 statement credit, no redemption fee — but insurance earns 10x only inside the PhonePe app (capped 500/month), zero elsewhere.
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 e-Gift Card worth ₹1,500
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 ₹14,000 a month
At ₹14,000 a month — ₹1,68,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,600 gross (earn ₹1,600) against its ₹1,499 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 #608
Why #608 A flat 1% in real rupees plus four lounge visits at ₹1,499 is a better everyday card than most of this shelf — it ranks here because 1% of nothing transferable is still nothing you can fly on.
The take
Read the reward line twice, because SBI's own co-brand shelf trains you to misread it: a point on this card is one rupee, redeemable as statement credit with no redemption fee, not the ₹0.25 catalogue scrip that ELITE, PRIME, Titan and Reliance PRIME pay. That makes 1 RP per ₹100 a flat 1% in real money, and 10 RP per ₹100 on recharges, bills, insurance and travel booked inside the PhonePe app a genuine 10% — for the first ₹15,000 of it each month, after which the tap closes. Add four complimentary domestic lounge visits, a ₹5,000 Yatra voucher at ₹5 lakh of spend, and a ₹1,499 fee reversed at ₹3 lakh, and this is a competent everyday card. It is not a travel card. The points reach no airline and no hotel, the forex is the full 3.5%, and since 1 July 2026 any Scan & Pay or online UPI outside PhonePe earns nothing at all — which on a payments-app card is a quiet, load-bearing exclusion.
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
₹1,499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹1,499/yr
The waiver ₹3,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹25,000 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹14,000 a month — ₹1,68,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹1,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹10,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹16,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹29,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹29,000 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 SELECT BLACK 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 as statement credit, with no redemption fee — a real 1% on ordinary spend
- 10 Reward Points per ₹100 on PhonePe recharges, utilities, bills, insurance and travel (capped at 1,500 a month)
- 5 Reward Points per ₹100 on other online spend (capped at 1,000 a month)
- 4 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year (max 1 a quarter) on SBI's 16-room "Set A" list
- ₹5,000 Yatra voucher at ₹5 lakh of annual spend — flights, domestic hotels and domestic holidays
- ₹1,499 renewal reversed on ₹3 lakh of spend in the previous membership year; ₹1,500 PhonePe welcome gift card
Watch out
- The points reach NO airline and NO hotel — 1% in statement credit is the whole ceiling, and it is also the floor
- Since 1 July 2026, Scan & Pay and online UPI transactions OUTSIDE PhonePe earn nothing
- The 10x pays only on PhonePe recharges, utilities, bill payments, insurance and travel — and caps at 1,500 points a month, 500 of that on insurance
- A long MCC exclusion list: fuel, wallet loads, rent, education, government, digital gaming, tolls, jewellery, gifts — and utilities or insurance paid outside the PhonePe app
- ZERO complimentary Priority Pass visits — the membership is free for 2 years, every entry is US$27 + taxes
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup, SBI's standard rate
- Points die 2 years after receipt, and the whole balance is forfeited after 13 consecutive months without a redemption
- SBI's own product record carries no online application path for this card — it is sourced through the PhonePe app, and we have not verified whether it is open to new applicants
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
12 sourced rules · 6 pay zero
Three earn tiers, each with its OWN monthly ceiling: 10 Reward Points per ₹100 on PhonePe spends (1,500 a calendar month, or just 500 for insurance), 5 per ₹100 on other online spends (1,000 a month) and 1 per ₹100 on everything else (2,000 a month). §12(7) then prints a full category-to-MCC exclusion table. The structural quirk worth reading twice: utilities and insurance are ACCELERATED inside the PhonePe app and EXCLUDED outside it — same category, opposite answers, decided by where you pay.
- Fuel · excluded Zero points — MCC 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero points — e-wallet loading, MCC 6540 and 6541
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points — rent and property management, MCC 6513, and SBI's MITC charges ₹199 + taxes per rent transaction on top
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · capped Paid inside the PhonePe app, utilities are one of the five accelerated categories at 10 Reward Points per ₹100 — but the PhonePe pool caps at 1,500 points a calendar month. Paid ANYWHERE ELSE they earn zero, MCC 4900, 4814 and 4899. Where you pay the bill decides everything
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹3,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹1,499 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 SELECT BLACK earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹3,00,000 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
16 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: Set A list w.e.f. 10 Jan 2026 (16 lounges, 8 cities)
Opens 16 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 8 airports — 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.
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
6 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
MITC row verbatim: "PhonePe SBI Card SELECT BLACK 1,499 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.3 Lakh or more in the preceding year)" — joining and renewal identical. Add-on cards free. Fuel surcharge waiver 1% on ₹500–₹4,000 transactions, capped at ₹250 a statement cycle. The ₹99 redemption fee that applies across SBI's range is explicitly waived here.
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 — 4 of them, each with the day we read it
- official PhonePe SBI Card SELECT BLACK e-kit — the reward table (10 / 5 / 1 points per ₹100 with monthly caps), the MCC exclusion list, and the ₹5,000 Yatra voucher terms
- official Product page — "1 Reward Points = Re. 1", 4 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year, ₹1,499 annual and renewal reversed at ₹3 lakh
- official MITC — "PhonePe SBI Card SELECT BLACK 1,499 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.3 Lakh or more in the preceding year)"; 3.5% foreign-currency fee
- official Airport Lounge Access — SBI lists "PhonePe SBI Card SELECT" on the "Set A" domestic list, 16 lounges in 8 cities, w.e.f. 10 Jan 2026