SimplySAVE SBI Card
KeepIndia's default first credit card — 1.67% on the groceries, and a quarter of a percent on everything else.
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: 2,000 bonus Reward Points worth ₹500 for spending ₹2,000 within 60 days of getting the card
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 ₹9,000 a month
At ₹9,000 a month — ₹1,08,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹200 gross (earn ₹200) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,00,000 a year = ₹200 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 #251
Why #251 Ten times points on groceries and dining is a real 1.67%, but it caps at 5,000 points a month and everything else pays 0.17% into a currency that reaches no airline — a fine first card, not a card that belongs any higher.
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, and they expire 24 months from the date they accrue. On this card they can also be used to pay down the card's own outstanding, which is the same ₹0.25 by another route.
The take
SimplySAVE is the card SBI hands the country, and the honest version of its pitch is shorter than the marketing one. Ten times points on dining, movies, departmental stores and groceries sounds enormous; it is 1.67%, because the base unit is 1 Reward Point per ₹150 and a Reward Point is 25 paise. That is still a perfectly respectable everyday rate on four categories a household actually spends in, and the accelerated tap runs to 5,000 points a month — about ₹75,000 of grocery-and-dining spend before it closes. Clear ₹1 lakh of annual spend and the ₹499 renewal is reversed, so the steady-state cost of holding it is nothing. Everything else is the small print: away from those four MCCs you earn 0.17%, fuel earns nothing at all, there is no lounge access of any kind, forex is the full 3.5%, and the points reach no airline and no hotel — 25 paise in the catalogue is where they start and where they stop. A good first card. Not a card you keep as your best card.
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
₹499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹499/yr
The waiver ₹1,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹8,333 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹9,000 a month — ₹1,08,000 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
₹500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹1,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹5,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹9,400 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
- 10X Reward Points on dining, movies, departmental stores and grocery — 1.67% at SBI's own 4-points-to-the-rupee rate
- ₹499 renewal fee reversed on ₹1 lakh of spend in the preceding year, so most holders pay nothing to keep it
- 2,000 bonus Reward Points worth ₹500 for spending ₹2,000 in the first 60 days
- 1% fuel surcharge waiver on transactions between ₹500 and ₹3,000, up to ₹100 a statement cycle
- Reward Points can be used to pay down the card's own outstanding balance
Watch out
- The 10X caps at 5,000 Reward Points a calendar month — roughly ₹75,000 of accelerated spend, then it reverts to 1 RP per ₹150
- 0.17% on everything outside the four promoted categories: one Reward Point per ₹150, at 25 paise a point
- No lounge access of any kind, domestic or international, and 3.5% forex
- SBI Reward Points reach no airline and no hotel programme — ₹0.25 in the catalogue is both floor and ceiling
- Fuel earns nothing (MCC 5172, 5541, 5542, 5983), and the base unit is ₹150, not ₹100
- Points expire 24 months from the date they accrue
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
7 sourced rules · 5 pay zero
Base 1 Reward Point per ₹150 at four points to the rupee = 0.17%. 10X on dining, movies, departmental stores and grocery = 1.67%, capped at 5,000 Reward Points a calendar month across all four categories combined, after which those categories drop back to 1 Reward Point per ₹150. The rows below are the card's own Terms & Conditions, which name the promoted and excluded MCCs outright.
- Fuel · excluded Zero points — MCC 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983 are excluded from the Reward Point programme; the 1% surcharge waiver on ₹500–₹3,000 transactions (max ₹100 a statement cycle) is all fuel gets
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points, and SBI's MITC adds a ₹199 processing fee on every 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
- Government / tax · excluded Zero points — MCC 9399 and 9311, under SBI's card-wide Shop-and-Smile exclusions
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹1,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹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 SimplySAVE SBI Card earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹1,00,000 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?
income, age and the route in
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.
Openly available and deliberately mass-market — SBI's live product record carries productType SAVE with isOnline "yes", isVisibleOnWebsite "yes" and a working Apply Now funnel, and tags the card "best-selling". Its ticker line advertises a variant on the same page for applicants who cannot clear the unsecured criteria: "Secured card variant 'Advantage' also available". SBI also white-labels SimplySAVE through EIGHT partner banks — Karur Vysya, Punjab & Sind, UCO, Karnataka, City Union, South Indian, Bank of Maharashtra and Central Bank of India — all branch-sold, with no online application. Karur Vysya additionally still markets its edition under the LEGACY NAME "KVB Gold Card" — same ₹499, same ₹1 lakh reversal, same 10X buckets; SBI's own record settles it by telling the applicant to "visit the nearest Karur Vysya Bank Branch" to apply for the KVB SimplySAVE SBI Card. (KVB's own page is stale on the rate: it still says 1 point per ₹100 where SBI's live record says per ₹150.) If your branch sold you a card called "SimplySAVE", this page is your card: SBI's own product records and the bank-wide MITC give all eight the same ₹499 fee, the same ₹1 lakh reversal, the same 10 Reward Points per ₹150 on dining, movies, departmental stores and grocery, the same 5,000-point monthly ceiling and the same 2,000-point welcome. Only the logo, the launch date and the network mix move — and the mix now runs to three schemes, because the MITC prices a RuPay "SimplySAVE UPI SBI Card" on its own fee row at the same ₹499.
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.
Fee ₹499 to get and ₹499 to keep, reversed on ₹1 lakh of spend in the preceding year. Reward Points expire 24 months from accrual. Rent payments carry a ₹199 processing fee; wallet loads above ₹1,000 carry 1% from 1 Nov 2025; education paid through a third-party app carries 1%. Payment dishonour 2%, min ₹500. Card replacement ₹100–₹250.
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 — 10 of them, each with the day we read it
- official The card's own Terms & Conditions — the Visa/Mastercard/RuPay network line, the 5,000-point monthly cap on the 10X, the four promoted MCCs, the fuel exclusion and the 24-month point expiry
- official Product page — 10X on dining, movies, departmental stores and grocery, 1 RP per ₹150 elsewhere, 4 Reward Points = ₹1, and the ₹499 fee reversed at ₹1 lakh of annual spend
- official KVB SimplySAVE SBI Card — one of seven partner-bank editions carrying an identical fee, waiver, earn rate and monthly cap
- official SBI's MITC — SimplySAVE SBI Card ₹499 annual and ₹499 renewal, waived on ₹1 lakh of spend in the preceding year, and the separate fee row for the UPI edition
- official Key Fact Statement — SimplySAVE ₹499 joining and ₹499 renewal, and the separate fee row for the Advantage edition
- official Allahabad Bank SimplySAVE SBI Card product page (archived 19-Aug-2019) — ₹499 joining and renewal, the same 10X tap and ₹1 lakh fee reversal as this card
- official Oriental Bank of Commerce SBI Card — ₹499, the 10X departmental-and-grocery tap and the ₹75,000 fee reversal this card carried in 2016
- official Lakshmi Vilas Bank SBI SimplySAVE Credit Card (archived 15-Apr-2016) — ₹499 and the same 2.5% departmental-store and grocery value back
- official BMB Gold & More Credit Card (archived 15-Apr-2016) — ₹499 joining and annual, ₹75,000 reversal and this card's earn, under a name SBI had retired
- official SBI Bank of Maharashtra Card on SBI's pre-migration host (archived 05-Aug-2012) — ₹499 joining and annual, the ₹75,000 reversal and this card's 2.5% departmental-store and grocery value back