SBI Card Unnati
KeepFree for four years against a fixed deposit — then ₹499 a year, forever, with no way to waive it.
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: Not published — SBI advertises no joining or first-spend bonus on this 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 →
Pays for itself at ₹5,000 a month
At ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹600 gross (earn ₹100 + milestones ₹500) against its ₹499 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.
3 notes on the card itself: how it is issued · the network variants · why it ranks #618
Why #618 Free for four years and issued against a fixed deposit, which is the whole point of it — a card for someone building a file, not someone optimising one, and 0.25% into a dead-end currency is what it pays for the privilege.
SBI Reward Points are four to the rupee — the card's own e-kit works the example: "if you have 2000 Reward Points in your account, you can use them to pay Rs. 500 from your credit card balance." That 2,000 is also the floor; below it you cannot redeem at all. The points reach no airline, no hotel and no transfer partner, and they expire 24 months from accrual.
The take
Unnati exists to put a credit card in the hands of someone a bank will not otherwise underwrite: it is issued against a lien on an SBI fixed deposit of ₹25,000 or more, and SBI markets it as a zero-fee card. That claim has a fifth year. The RBI-mandated Key Fact Statement prints "NIL / 499 (5th Year Onwards)" and the card's own booklet says "Annual fee of Rs.499, waived off for first 4 years" — so nothing to get it, nothing for four years, and ₹499 every year after that, with no spend-based reversal to escape through. Judge it on what it is and it is fine: a flat 1 Reward Point per ₹100, four points to the rupee, so 0.25%; ₹500 of cashback if you push ₹50,000 through it in a year, which more than covers the fee once the fee starts; and a 1% fuel surcharge waiver. Judge it as a rewards card and there is nothing here — no accelerated category, no lounge visit, no transfer partner, and a currency you cannot touch until you have 2,000 points. Take it to build a credit file. Replace it before the fifth anniversary.
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
₹499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 joining, then ₹499/yr
Break-even ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹2,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹8,500 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹14,100 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
- Nothing to get it, and nothing to keep it for four years — the ₹499 fee starts in year five
- ₹500 cashback for spending ₹50,000 in a year, which is more than the fee it eventually charges
- Issued against a lien on an SBI fixed deposit of ₹25,000 or more, so it is reachable without an income proof
- Finance charges are 2.75% a month (33% a year), not the 3.75% SBI's unsecured cards carry
- 1% fuel surcharge waiver on ₹500–₹3,000 transactions, up to ₹100 a statement cycle
Watch out
- The "no annual fee" claim is true for four years only — ₹499 a year from the fifth, and there is NO spend-based reversal on this card
- 0.25% flat on everything, with no accelerated category of any kind
- No lounge access, no welcome bonus, no milestone beyond the single ₹500 cashback, and 3.5% forex
- You need 2,000 Reward Points before you can redeem anything at all
- Fuel earns nothing; rent stopped earning on 1 Apr 2024 and government payments on 1 Jun 2024
- Points expire 24 months from accrual
- Your fixed deposit is under lien for as long as you hold the card
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 · 5 pay zero
A flat 1 Reward Point per ₹100 at four points to the rupee = 0.25%, with no accelerated category anywhere on the card. The exclusions below are the card's own e-kit, which dates two of them.
- Fuel · excluded Zero points — MCC 5172, 5541, 5542 and 5983; the 1% surcharge waiver on ₹500–₹3,000 (max ₹100 a statement cycle) is all fuel gets
- Rent & property management · excluded Zero points from 1 Apr 2024 (MCC 6513), named on this card by name in its own e-kit; SBI's MITC adds a ₹199 processing fee per rent transaction
- 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 from 1 Jun 2024 — MCC 9399 and 9311, named on this card by name
Does your spend count toward the milestones?
not published — and we say which
₹50,000 a year is the bar for the first milestone. 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 Unnati earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the milestones — the ₹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
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.
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.
Openly available and aimed squarely at first-time borrowers. SBI's live product record carries productType UNNA with a working Apply Now funnel, and the card is issued against an SBI fixed deposit rather than against income, so the usual salary and ITR bars do not apply.
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 TRAP. The MITC row reads "SBI Card Unnati / NIL / 499 (5th Year Onwards)" and carries NO spend-based reversal clause, unlike almost every other SBI row: nothing to get the card, nothing for four years, then ₹499 every year with no way to waive it. The card's own e-kit says the same — "Annual fee of Rs.499, waived off for first 4 years". Cheque Payment Fee ₹200 is expressly not applicable to Unnati. 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 — 3 of them, each with the day we read it
- official The card's own e-kit Terms & Conditions — "Annual fee of Rs.499, waived off for first 4 years", 1 Reward Point per ₹100, the 2,000-point redemption floor and the rent and government cut-offs
- official Product page — free for the first four years, ₹499 from the fifth, ₹500 cashback at ₹50,000 of annual spend, and the SBI fixed-deposit lien the card is issued against
- official SBI's MITC — "SBI Card Unnati / NIL / 499 (5th Year Onwards)", with no spend-based reversal, and the 2.75% monthly finance charge secured cards carry