SBI Railway Card
CancelIndian Railways' own credit card, drawn by R. K. Laxman, with a points currency of its own.
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 for itself at ₹4,000 a month
At ₹4,000 a month — ₹48,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹400 gross (earn ₹400) against its ₹300 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.
2 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants
The take
Before IRCTC and SBI settled on the card they sell today, they sold this one: a Visa card co-branded with Indian Railways through IRCTC, with artwork by R. K. Laxman, and a rewards currency that belonged to the railway rather than to SBI. Its useful trick was arithmetic rather than glamour — it waived the 1.8% transaction charge IRCTC levied on every online credit-card booking, which on a family's year of AC travel was worth more than most reward tables. It carried complimentary personal rail accident cover of ₹10 lakh for death in a train accident on a ticket bought with the card, and it enrolled you in Indian Railways' Shubh Yatra scheme for frequent travellers, which returned part of an AC fare as railway points you cashed in for a free ticket at irctc.co.in. The fee was genuinely two numbers, which is rare: ₹500 to take it and ₹300 a year afterwards. The base earn is honest and small — one Railway Point per ₹125 at a rupee a point, so 0.8% — and the card was never about that: it was about the 1.8% you stopped paying IRCTC on every booking, which on a family's year of AC travel dwarfed the points. The card is long gone; IRCTC SBI Card and IRCTC SBI Card Premier are what replaced it, and their points are a different currency living in SBI's own engine.
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
₹300/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹500 joining, then ₹300/yr
Break-even ₹4,000 a month — ₹48,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹2,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹4,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹9,300 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹28,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹47,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
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
- Waived IRCTC's 1.8% online transaction charge on every railway ticket booked with it
- Complimentary ₹10 lakh personal rail accident cover, for a ticket bought on the card
- Complimentary enrolment in Indian Railways' Shubh Yatra (SOFT) frequent-traveller scheme
- ₹500 to take it, then ₹300 a year — a genuinely two-number fee, not the same figure written twice
Watch out
- Withdrawn — absent from SBI's 67-record product catalogue and from both its Key Fact Statement and its MITC fee table
- The points were Indian Railways', not SBI Reward Points — a separate ₹1 scrip that bought train tickets and nothing else
- The Shubh Yatra rebate excluded 3AC, the class most people actually travel
- Points redeemed only against railway tickets on irctc.co.in — no airline, no hotel, no catalogue
- The ₹300 renewal had no published spend-based reversal
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes SBI Railway 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. SBI Card retired the product and the page survives only on its pre-migration host. IRCTC SBI Card at ₹500 and IRCTC SBI Card Premier at ₹1,499 are the live railway co-brands, and both are on this board.
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 — 2 of them, each with the day we read it
- official SBI Card's own SBI Railway Card page on its pre-migration host, archived 02-Jul-2010 — the two-number fee table, the IRCTC surcharge waiver and the rail accident cover
- official SBI's own 67-card product catalogue — this card is not in it, and neither fee document carries a row for it either