Shaurya Select SBI Card
KeepFree to get, ₹1,499 to keep — and the one SBI card that pays 5X on the CSD canteen.
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
Read the ₹0.4L figure carefully: ₹2,000 of its ₹4,300 gross is a voucher or a hotel night, not points — worth that only if you would have bought it anyway.
Welcome: Not published as a joining bonus — SBI instead pays 1,500 Reward Points (₹375) each time the renewal fee is charged
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 ₹14,000 a month
At ₹14,000 a month — ₹1,68,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹800 gross (earn ₹800) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹1,499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,50,000 a year = ₹800 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 #616
Why #616 Free to get, four lounge visits, a ₹7,000 Yatra voucher and a ₹1.5 lakh waiver bar make this the most generous card on SBI's defence shelf — held back only by a currency fixed at 25 paise with nowhere to transfer.
SBI Reward Points are four to the rupee against the rewards catalogue — ₹0.25 a point, floor and ceiling, with no airline, hotel or transfer partner on the other side. They can also be used to pay down the card's own outstanding, which is the same 25 paise by a different door.
The take
This is SBI's card for serving and retired defence personnel, and the fee line is the thing to read twice, because it runs the opposite way to the usual: nothing to get the card, ₹1,499 every year to keep it, and that renewal reversed at ₹1.5 lakh of spend in the preceding year — a bar most holders will clear. What the ₹1,499 buys is real: four complimentary domestic lounge visits a year, a ₹10 lakh personal accident cover, a ₹500 Pizza Hut voucher in any quarter you spend ₹50,000, a ₹7,000 Yatra or Pantaloons voucher at ₹5 lakh, 1,500 Reward Points back each time the fee is actually charged, and 24×7 concierge. The 5X list is the giveaway that this card was designed for a specific household — it covers the CSD canteen alongside dining, movies, departmental stores and groceries. The engine is ordinary: 2 Reward Points per ₹100 is 0.5%, four points to the rupee, and they reach no airline and no hotel. Finance charges are 2.75% a month rather than SBI's usual 3.75%, which is a genuine concession the defence range keeps. Hold it for the lounge doors and the vouchers; do not hold it for the points.
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 ₹0 joining, then ₹1,499/yr
The waiver ₹1,50,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹12,500 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, and it gets there by erasing the fee at the waiver rather than out-earning it.
At your spend
₹3,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹11,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹14,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹25,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹37,200 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
- Nothing to get the card — SBI's Key Fact Statement prints NIL against the joining charge and ₹1,499 against the renewal
- 4 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year (max 1 a quarter)
- ₹7,000 Yatra or Pantaloons e-gift voucher at ₹5 lakh of annual spend, and a ₹500 Pizza Hut voucher every quarter you spend ₹50,000
- 5X Reward Points on CSD canteen spends as well as dining, movies, departmental stores and grocery
- ₹10 lakh complimentary personal accident cover, 1,500 Reward Points on every renewal, and 24×7 concierge
- Finance charges of 2.75% a month (33% a year) — SBI's defence and secured cards escape the 3.75% the rest of the book pays
Watch out
- ₹1,499 every year from the second, reversed only if you spent ₹1.5 lakh in the preceding year
- Reward Points are fixed at 4 to the rupee and reach NO airline or hotel — 0.5% is the base and 2.5% is the ceiling
- 3.5% foreign-currency markup, SBI's standard rate
- Fuel earns nothing
- SBI publishes no card-specific rewards booklet for Shaurya Select, so the exact per-₹100 figure behind "5X" is not printed anywhere on its own page
- The Digital Membership Kit SBI links from this card's page describes a different, ₹499 product entirely — do not read fees or earn rates out of it
- Points expire 24 months from accrual
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
5 sourced rules · 3 pay zero
Base 2 Reward Points per ₹100 at four points to the rupee = 0.5%. SBI publishes the accelerator as "5X Reward Points on CSD, Dining, Movies, Departmental Stores and Grocery" and prints no per-₹100 figure for this card; on every SBI card that pairs a 5X label with a 2-point base its own booklet resolves it to 10 Reward Points per ₹100, which is the 2.5% we model. No card-specific rewards booklet is published, and the Digital Membership Kit SBI links from this page is SimplySAVE's brochure filed in the wrong directory — it must not be read for rates.
- Fuel · excluded Zero points; the 1% surcharge waiver on ₹500–₹4,000 transactions (max ₹250 a statement cycle) is all fuel gets
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points under SBI's card-wide Shop-and-Smile exclusions, and the MITC adds a ₹199 processing fee per rent transaction (MCC 6513)
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero points on e-wallet loads (MCC 6540, 6541), which also carry a 1% fee above ₹1,000 from 1 Nov 2025
- Groceries & supermarkets · accelerated 5X Reward Points on departmental stores and grocery, and on CSD canteen spends, which is the benefit designed for this card's household
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹1,50,000 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 Shaurya Select SBI Card earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹1,50,000 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
17 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: None published
Opens 17 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 10 airports , via RuPay — see the full map →
Can you get it?
income, age and the route in
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.
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
7 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
THE FEE INVERSION. The MITC row reads "Shaurya Select SBI Card / NIL / 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.1.5 Lakh or more in the preceding year)" — nothing to GET the card, ₹1,499 a year to KEEP it. Do not read those two columns the other way round. SBI's cheaper Shaurya SBI Card sits two rows below at 250/250, waived at ₹50,000; it is a different product. Points expire 24 months from accrual.
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 Product page — 4 complimentary domestic lounge visits a year, a ₹7,000 Yatra or Pantaloons voucher at ₹5 lakh, a quarterly ₹500 Pizza Hut voucher, and 2 Reward Points per ₹100 with 5X on CSD spends
- official SBI's MITC — "Shaurya Select SBI Card / NIL / 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.1.5 Lakh or more in the preceding year)", and the 2.75% monthly finance charge the defence range carries
- official SBI's RBI-mandated Key Fact Statement — the same NIL joining and ₹1,499 renewal, and the definition of the two columns that makes the reading unambiguous
- official SBI's lounge page — Shaurya Select is in NEITHER the Set A nor the Set B eligible list, so its four visits are not restricted to SBI's 16- and 30-room lists