Standard Chartered Rewards
KeepFour lounge visits, a fee that reverses itself — and a point worth a quarter of what SC's own tile implies.
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 — SC advertises no welcome bonus; the 4,000 reward points on offer are a consolation for paying the annual fee, credited only if you did not earn the spend-based reversal
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 ₹1,100 gross (earn ₹1,100) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹1,000 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹1,50,000 a year = ₹1,100 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
Standard Chartered redeems THIS card's points at ₹0.25 in the 360° catalogue and ₹0.20 against the statement — a quarter of the ₹1.00 the Ultimate gets, from SC's own FAQ. earn.base already bakes that discount in.
The take
Read the point value before you read anything else on this card, because Standard Chartered puts two different ones on the same website. The rewards tile says "1 reward point = INR 1"; that line belongs to the Ultimate. This card's own FAQ says 1 point is ₹0.25 in the catalogue and ₹0.20 against your statement. So 4 points per ₹150 is not the 2.67% the arithmetic promises — it is 0.67%, and the celebrated "4X plus 4X" headline tops out at 1.33% on the slice of monthly retail spend above ₹20,000, capped at 2,000 bonus points a cycle. Every redemption then costs ₹99 in handling, and the points go nowhere else: there is no airline partner and no hotel partner on the entire 360° programme. What makes it worth carrying anyway is the shape of the deal rather than the rate. There is no joining fee at all, the ₹1,000 that starts in year two is reversed at ₹1,50,000 of prior-year spend, and if you do pay it SC hands back 4,000 points. Against that effectively-zero cost you get one complimentary domestic lounge visit every calendar quarter with no spend gate attached — four doors a year for nothing, which is the reason this card is on a travel desk at all. Forex is the full 3.5%, fuel earns nothing, and SC's own page now tells Ultimate applicants to visit a branch, which makes this the live rung of the ladder rather than the interesting one. Take it for the lounges and the zero cost; do not take 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
₹1,000/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 joining, then ₹1,000/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
₹2,200 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹5,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹13,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹28,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹43,600 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
Standard Chartered 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.
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
- 1 complimentary domestic lounge visit every calendar quarter — 4 a year, with no spend gate
- No joining fee; the ₹1,000 annual fee starts in year two and reverses at ₹1,50,000 of prior-year spend
- 4,000 reward points back if you do pay the annual fee and missed the spend reversal
- 8 reward points per ₹150 on monthly retail spend above ₹20,000, up to 2,000 bonus points a cycle
Watch out
- SC values THIS card's point at ₹0.25 in the catalogue and ₹0.20 against the statement — not the ₹1.00 its Ultimate gets, so the real base rate is 0.67%
- ₹99 handling fee on every redemption, and 1,000 points is the minimum you can redeem
- The 360° programme has no airline and no hotel transfer partner — these points cannot become a seat
- Bonus points cap at 2,000 a statement cycle, and government and insurance spend never earns them
- Fuel and cash withdrawals earn nothing; forex is the full 3.5%
- SC's own page routes applicants to a branch or the contact centre rather than a full online journey
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes StanC 360° 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 · 1 pay zero
- Fuel · excluded Zero reward points — SC's own headline carries the carve-out inline: "4 reward points per INR 150 on all Retail spends (except Government, Insurance and Fuel categories)". What replaces them is a 1% fuel surcharge waiver on transactions between ₹400 and ₹2,000, capped at ₹400 a month, and the shelf tariff adds a 1% charge (min ₹10) on petrol transactions
- Insurance · reduced 1 reward point per ₹150 vs 4 reward points per ₹150 on ordinary retail — a quarter of the base rate, and the MITC excludes insurance payments from the 4X bonus band as well
- Government / tax · reduced 1 reward point per ₹150 vs 4 reward points per ₹150 on ordinary retail — a quarter of the base rate. Government spend is also excluded from the 4X bonus band on retail above ₹20,000 a cycle, so it never earns more than the 1X
per Standard Chartered T&C · rank every card by spend category →
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 ₹1,000 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. Standard Chartered states what the Standard Chartered Rewards earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — 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
43 of 793 tracked doors
Gate: None — SC attaches no spend condition to the lounge quota, which is what makes four doors a year free on a card whose fee reverses
Opens 43 of 793 tracked lounge doors across 24 airports , via Mastercard India — 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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
per the official Standard Chartered 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.
There is no joining fee at all on this card — SC's own fees block reads "Joining Fee — No Joining Fee" — and the ₹1,000 + GST starts in year two, reversed on ₹1,50,000 of prior-year spend, with 4,000 reward points instead if you pay it and missed the reversal. The MITC settles the bonus mechanics the product page leaves ambiguous: "Additional 4x bonus reward points are applicable on every INR 150 spent on retail purchases exceeding INR 20,000 (except in government, insurance payments and fuel categories) per statement cycle. Maximum bonus reward points earned is capped to 2000 per statement cycle" — so the second 4X pays only on the slice above the threshold. Shelf-wide charges: cheque return ₹500, card replacement ₹250, PIN replacement ₹100, duplicate statement ₹125 if over a month old, 1% on petrol transactions (min ₹10) and 2.5% on railway transactions (min ₹25), and ₹250 if the card is not used in its first three months. Rental payments on MCC 6513 have carried a 1% processing fee since 2 April 2023. Read the point value before the rate: SC's FAQ prices THIS card's point at ₹0.25 in the catalogue and ₹0.20 against the statement, not the ₹1.00 the Ultimate gets. Standard Chartered publishes no income criterion for this card.
per the official Standard Chartered MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
What's changed for this card
3 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.
- 15 Oct 2024EaseMyTrip card loses Priority Pass, domestic visits halved1 complimentary domestic lounge visit per quarter + Priority Pass with 2 international visits a year → 2 domestic visits per calendar year; no Priority Pass, no complimentary international lounge access
The travel co-brand quietly stopped being a travel card: from 15 October 2024, Standard Chartered pulled Priority Pass from the EaseMyTrip card entirely and cut domestic lounge access from four visits a year to two. International lounges are now pay-per-visit at rack rates. What's left is a ₹350 EaseMyTrip discount coupon — which, to be fair, is what it always really was.
- 25 Aug 2024Ultimate's forex settles at a clean 2% at posting
- 2 Apr 2023Ultimate cuts six categories from 3.33% to 2%
Verified against Standard Chartered'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 and FAQ — 4 reward points per ₹150 on retail, an additional 4 above ₹20,000 a month capped at 2,000 a cycle, one domestic lounge visit a quarter, and the point valued at ₹0.25
- official Standard Chartered's shelf-wide tariffs and charges — the row that prints this card's year-one Nil and year-two ₹1,000 as two separate charges, and the shelf-wide 3.5% overseas fee
- official Rewards Credit Card MITC — the bonus applies to retail spend EXCEEDING ₹20,000 a statement cycle, capped at 2,000 points, and overseas transactions carry a 3.5% fee
- official Rewards Credit Card product terms — the lounge quota runs on the Mastercard domestic lounge programme, entered with a ₹2 validation swipe