#970

SBI Card PRIME Advantage

Downgrade

PRIME's price and PRIME's points, with both of its hotel and airline tie-ups taken away.

₹6,400

a year at ₹40,000 a month, after the fee

Verified · 4 documents

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

What it's worth to you, after the fee

₹5,500
at ₹0.25L/month
₹6,400
at ₹0.4L/month
₹17,000
at ₹1L/month

Read the ₹0.4L figure carefully: ₹4,000 of its ₹6,400 gross is a voucher or a hotel night, not points — worth that only if you would have bought it anyway.

Welcome: e-Gift voucher worth ₹3,000 — Bata/Hush Puppies, Pantaloons, Shoppers Stop or Yatra.com

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 for itself at ₹17,000 a month

At ₹17,000 a month — ₹2,04,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹5,000 gross (earn ₹1,000 + bonuses ₹4,000) against its ₹2,999 fee = ₹2,000 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 #970

SBI Card · Visa · premium

Visa — The archived product page carries Visa Signature privileges and a Visa payWave contactless block; SBI never published a Mastercard or Amex form of this edition

Why #970 Same fee, same waiver bar and the same 0.5% engine as plain PRIME, but SBI has stripped both of its hotel and airline memberships by name and left it off the current lounge list — so it ranks below the parent it was priced against.

₹2,999 + GST
Annual fee1
₹3,00,000 spend
Fee waiver

SBI Reward Points are four to the rupee against the rewards catalogue — ₹0.25 a point, floor and ceiling. They reach no airline, no hotel and no transfer partner. The two loyalty programmes this edition once did reach, Trident Privilege and Club Vistara, were both withdrawn from it by SBI in 2024, and Club Vistara itself has since folded into Air India.

The take

PRIME Advantage is priced as plain PRIME to the rupee — ₹2,999 to take, ₹2,999 to keep, reversed at ₹3 lakh of spend — and earns exactly what PRIME earns: 2 Reward Points per ₹100, ten per ₹100 on dining, departmental stores, movies and groceries, twenty on utility bills paid by standing instruction until the monthly cap closes, and a fixed four points to the rupee at the end of it. The vouchers survive too: a ₹3,000 welcome e-gift voucher, ₹1,000 of Pizza Hut every quarter you spend ₹50,000, and ₹7,000 of Yatra or Pantaloons at ₹5 lakh. What has been taken away is everything that made it a travel card. SBI's own page carries two dated notices stripping it: Trident Privilege Red from 30 June 2024, Club Vistara Silver from 17 October 2024 — the second one naming PRIME Advantage specifically. Club Vistara no longer exists in any case. And SBI's current airport-lounge entitlement list names every other PRIME edition by name, all eight partner-bank ones and PRIME Pro included, while omitting this one. Hold it and it is a voucher card; do not buy it, because SBI will not sell it to you anyway.

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.

₹3,00,000 annual spend erases that fee
₹17,000/mo is where it starts paying for itself

the whole desk — your spend, what changed, the downgrade →

Keep, downgrade or cancel

₹2,999/yr at stake · 5 spend bands

The charge ₹2,999/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 ₹17,000 a month — ₹2,04,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.

At your spend

₹5,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged

₹14,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged

₹17,000 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

₹41,000 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 →

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

  • Priced identically to plain SBI Card PRIME in the same MITC fee table — ₹2,999, reversed at ₹3 lakh of annual spend
  • 10 RP per ₹100 on dining, departmental stores, movies and groceries; 20 per ₹100 on utility standing instructions until the monthly cap
  • ₹1,000 Pizza Hut e-voucher every quarter you spend ₹50,000
  • ₹7,000 Yatra.com / Pantaloons e-gift voucher at ₹5 lakh of annual spend
  • ₹3,000 welcome e-gift voucher on payment of the joining fee

Watch out

  • SBI withdrew Club Vistara Silver from this card by name on 17 October 2024, and Trident Privilege Red on 30 June 2024 — both are gone, and Club Vistara has since merged into Air India
  • SBI's current airport-lounge entitlement list names every other PRIME edition and omits this one
  • SBI no longer sells it — the product URL redirects to plain PRIME and there is no application form for any Advantage edition
  • SBI has never published what an Advantage edition is issued against; the fee table names it and the body of the MITC never does
  • Reward Points are fixed at 4 RP = ₹1 with zero airline or hotel transfer partners
  • 0.5% base earn; the 10X categories still only reach 2.5%, and fuel earns nothing

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 →

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 ₹2,999 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 SBI Card PRIME Advantage earns, 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

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.

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.