SBI Card PULSE
DowngradeA fitness card with four lounge visits stapled on — the travel case is thin.
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: Noise ColorFit Pulse 4 Pro smartwatch worth ₹7,999 on joining-fee payment
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 →
Breaks even only by erasing its fee at ₹18,000 a month
At ₹18,000 a month — ₹2,16,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹1,000 gross (earn ₹1,000) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹1,499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹2,00,000 a year = ₹1,000 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 #157
Why #157 Four domestic lounge visits and a fitness bundle are a thin travel case, and SBI's own lounge T&C confirms zero complimentary international visits — the ₹1,499 is bought back by health perks a travel reader will not use.
The take
PULSE is SBI's wellness card, and the desk only has it on file because ₹1,499 used to buy eight domestic lounge visits. It does not any more: SBI's own lounge terms now say four a year, capped at one a quarter, and the Priority Pass membership it hands you carries zero complimentary visits — every entry abroad is US$27 out of pocket. Add 3.5% forex and a points programme fixed at 4 RP to the rupee with no transfer partners, and the travel ledger reads: four lounge visits. The smartwatch, FITPASS PRO and Netmeds First are real value if you actually go to a gym; if you are here for miles, PRIME costs ₹1,500 more and doubles the lounge count with four international visits on top.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card reaches break-even by ERASING its fee, not by out-earning it: the waiver is the decision.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
₹1,499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹1,499/yr
The waiver ₹2,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹16,667 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹18,000 a month — ₹2,16,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee, and it gets there by erasing the fee at the waiver rather than out-earning it.
At your spend
₹1,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹4,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹7,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹18,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹29,700 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
- 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
- 4 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year (1 per quarter)
- Noise ColorFit Pulse 4 Pro smartwatch worth ₹7,999 as the welcome gift
- Complimentary 1-year FITPASS PRO and Netmeds First memberships, renewed each year you pay the fee
- 10 RP per ₹100 (2.5%) on chemist, pharmacy, sports, dining and movies
- ₹1,500 e-voucher at ₹4L annual retail spend; renewal fee waived at ₹2L
Watch out
- The Priority Pass membership comes with NO complimentary international visits — US$27 + tax per entry, per SBI's own lounge T&C
- Only 4 domestic lounge visits a year, and only 1 per quarter — miss a quarter and it is gone
- Since 10 Jan 2026 PULSE is restricted to SBI's Set A domestic list — 16 lounges in 8 metros, not the ~72-room Visa network. No Chandigarh, no Goa, no Kochi, no Jaipur.
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup
- Reward Points are fixed at 4 RP = ₹1 with no airline or hotel transfer partners; base earn is 0.5%
- The welcome smartwatch and the health memberships are the bulk of the value — none of it travels
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 →
What earns, what doesn't
11 sourced rules · 5 pay zero
2 Reward Points per ₹100 base = 0.5%, and 10 per ₹100 on chemist and pharmacy, dining, movies and sports — a health-shaped accelerator, capped at 7,500 points a calendar month. §11.4(b) of the booklet names only fuel and then says "for complete list of exclusions, please refer to Shop and Smile Rewards Program T&Cs", so the rest is sourced there and to the dated card lists, which name "SBI Card Pulse" on every one.
- Fuel · excluded Zero points — MCC 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983, the only exclusion the card's own booklet spells out
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points — MCC 6513, discontinued w.e.f. 1 Apr 2024, with "SBI Card Pulse" on SBI's list for that date; MITC adds ₹199 + taxes per rent transaction
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero points — MCC 6540 and 6541, w.e.f. 1 Jul 2020
- Government / tax · excluded Zero points — MCC 9399 and 9311, discontinued w.e.f. 1 Jun 2024, with "SBI Card Pulse" on SBI's list for that date
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹2,00,000 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 SBI Card PULSE earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹2,00,000 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); no spend-earned extra visits on PULSE
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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
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.
Fee ₹1,499 joining and renewal, reversed on ₹2L preceding-year spend. Fuel surcharge waiver 1% on ₹500–₹4,000 transactions, capped at ₹250 a statement cycle. SBI's own Lounge Benefits T&C confirms 4 domestic visits a year (1 per quarter) and ZERO complimentary Priority Pass visits — US$27 + taxes per international entry.
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 — 6 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — 4 domestic lounge visits (1/quarter), earn rates, milestone, welcome smartwatch
- official Lounge Benefits T&C — 4 domestic visits/year capped at 1 per quarter; NO complimentary Priority Pass visits (US$27 + taxes per visit)
- official MITC — ₹1,499 joining/renewal, waived at ₹2L preceding-year spend; 3.5% foreign-currency fee — PULSE is not on the 1.99% exception list
- official Airport Lounge Access — "SBI Card PULSE" is listed under "Set A: Eligible Credit Cards" (the ₹1,499 tier), alongside SBI Card MILES
- community CardInsider review (note: still claims 8 domestic visits — SBI's own T&C says 4)
- official "SBI Card PULSE Sprint" (archived 28-May-2023) — a second CMS path serving this card's own page, still listed in SBI's sitemap and now redirecting here