SBI Platinum Card (2007)
CancelFree for life, and for two years it charged nothing at all on foreign spend.
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 from the first rupee
At ₹1,000 a month — ₹12,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹100 gross (earn ₹100) against its ₹0 fee = ₹100 net — at or above ₹0 from the first rung we price. 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 #1088
Why #1088 Free for life, no forex markup at all for its first two years, and 2.5 points per ₹100 into SBI's gift catalogue. Carried, not crowned: the card has not been issued since 2009 and the markup waiver died a year before the card did.
SBI branded this card's programme "Power Points" and never published a rupee value for one. What it published was the redemption menu — gift vouchers at Tanishq, Nike, Levi's and Hidesign, and "a variety of top-of-the-line gifts: travel bags, wallets, watches, electronic items" — which is the posted SBI gift catalogue its Reward Points still redeem against at four points to the rupee, and the block itself switches to the words "reward points" twice while describing how to redeem. Priced at ₹0.25 on that basis. No airline, no hotel, no transfer partner: the two ways out are the voucher rail and the gift catalogue.
The take
Two things make this 2007 card worth reading about now, and the first is the fee: SBI printed "Free For Life" against the annual fee, "Nil" against the joining fee and "Nil" against the add-on fee, and the 2009 capture of the same page still says Nil. The second is what it did on foreign spend, which no Indian card does today. Its own benefits page: "While other cards may charge you as much as 3.5% on your purchase, your Platinum Card waives it completely." Its own fee table, independently: "Conversion mark up : 3.5%. Not Applicable for SBI Platinum Card." That is a free card with zero forex markup, in 2007, and the closest live equivalent charges you ₹3,000 a year for a 0.99% markup. The rest was a proper premium bundle for the era — a 24×7 International SOS concierge, Visa Platinum golf and dining, and travel insurance that paid ₹25,000 for lost checked baggage, ₹12,000 for an international flight delayed over 12 hours, ₹10,000 for a lost passport and ₹5,000 a day for up to a week of hijacking. Earning was 2.5 points per ₹100 into the gift catalogue — a point per ₹40, against the point per ₹125 that SBI's ₹1,500 Gold Card of the same shelf paid, so a little over three times the rate for none of the fee. Then SBI took the good part back: by March 2009 the markup waiver was off both the benefits page and the fee table, replaced by a "Special Offer" of 3 points per ₹40 on international spend, and the card was gone within the year.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card is lifetime free. There is no fee due, no renewal to weigh, and nothing to cancel to save.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
nothing due at the anniversary · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 — lifetime free
At your spend
₹1,900 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹3,800 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹7,500 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹22,500 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹37,500 a year at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
Everyday earn plus milestones, with no fee to subtract — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
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
- "Free For Life" against the annual fee, Nil joining and Nil add-on — SBI's own words on two captures two years apart
- No foreign-currency markup at all until 2008: "Conversion mark up : 3.5%. Not Applicable for SBI Platinum Card"
- Travel insurance covering ₹25,000 of lost checked baggage, ₹12,000 of international flight delay and ₹10,000 for a lost passport
- ₹5,000 a day for up to seven days if the aircraft was hijacked, in India or abroad
- A 24-hour International SOS concierge covering hotels, car hire, roadside repair and towing
- Complimentary tee-offs at over 25 courses through Visa Platinum Golf
- 0% fuel surcharge on transactions between ₹400 and ₹3,000
Watch out
- The forex waiver did NOT last: by March 2009 both the benefits page and the fee table print the plain 3.5% markup, with no carve-out
- 0.625% into a gift catalogue that reached no airline and no hotel — the exit is vouchers and merchandise
- No lounge access of any kind; the golf and dining blocks are Visa Platinum discounts, not doors
- Extended credit ran up to 3.10% a month (37.2% a year) from the transaction date
- Cash advances capped at 80% of the credit limit and ₹12,000 a day, at the same 3.10% a month from day one
- Late payment of 30% of the minimum due, ₹350 to ₹600 — the harshest band on SBI's 2007 shelf
- Withdrawn — absent from SBI's 67-record live product catalogue, and the whole GE-SBI shelf that sold it is gone
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 card's pages went dark with the rest of SBI's GE-era sbicard.com/sbi/ shelf, and the SBI Platinum Card that came next on sbicard.com was a paid card with the full 3.5% markup restored. Nothing SBI sells today waives forex; the live cards that come closest are on this board under the low-markup best-of.
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 — 5 of them, each with the day we read it
- official SBI Card's own SBI Platinum Card benefits page, archived 11-Oct-2007 — the international markup waiver, the travel insurance schedule and the Power Points rate
- official The same card's Fees and Charges page (archived 11-Oct-2007) — "Free For Life" against the annual fee, and the markup carve-out repeated in the fee table
- official The last capture of the same page (12-Mar-2009) — the markup waiver gone, and a 3-points-per-₹40 international offer in its place
- official The same card's fee table sixteen months later (archived 03-Mar-2009) — annual fee still Nil, and the forex carve-out deleted
- official SBI's own live product catalogue — 67 cards, and no plain SBI Platinum Card among them