Standard Chartered Smart
KeepEighteen thousand rupees a year, and Standard Chartered will tell you so itself.
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 on Smart; the joining fee itself is currently waived as a promotional offer instead
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 ₹600) 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 #397
Why #397 A pure cashback card with no lounge, no partner and no forex relief, on the board only under the all-cards mandate. The rate is real — 2% online and 1% elsewhere with no category games — but both buckets are capped in rupees at ₹1,000 and ₹500 a month, so the whole card is worth ₹18,000 a year at its own ceiling and nothing above it.
The take
This is the rare Indian cashback card that publishes its own ceiling instead of burying it. Standard Chartered's value chart for Smart is three rows long: ₹50,000 a month of online spend earns ₹1,000, ₹50,000 a month of everything else earns ₹500, and the annual total is ₹18,000. That is the whole product. Two percent online and one percent elsewhere is a clean, honest structure with no MCC lottery and no portal to route through, but the rupee caps bite at ₹50,000 a month per bucket — spend ₹2 lakh a month and you still get ₹1,500. Fuel earns nothing at all. What is genuinely good here is the cost of entry: the ₹499 first-year fee is currently waived as a promotional offer for new-to-SCB applicants, and the ₹499 renewal reverses at ₹1,20,000 of annual spend, which is ₹10,000 a month — comfortably below where the cashback caps stop paying. So a disciplined holder runs this free and banks ₹18,000. There is no travel case: forex is 3.5%, there is no lounge quota of any kind, and cashback credited to a card account reaches no airline and no hotel. Take it as a second card for online spend and stop there.
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 ₹499/yr
The waiver ₹1,20,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹10,000 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — is where this card's value crosses its fee.
At your spend
₹2,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹5,600 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹6,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹6,000 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹6,000 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
- 2% cashback on online spends and 1% on everything else — no categories, no portal, no minimum
- ₹18,000 a year is SC's own stated ceiling, from its own value chart
- ₹499 renewal reversed at ₹1,20,000 of annual spend, and the first-year fee is currently waived as a promotional offer
- Transactions convert to a 3-month EMI at 0.99% a month with nil processing fee, and the first 90 days carry an extended interest-free period on the minimum due
Watch out
- The 2% online bucket caps at ₹1,000 a month and the 1% bucket at ₹500 — ₹18,000 a year is the hard ceiling however much you spend
- Fuel transactions earn no cashback at all
- Forex is 3.5%, the shelf-wide Standard Chartered rate, and this card has no carve-out
- No lounge access of any kind, domestic or international
- The first-year fee waiver is a Special Offer, not a published Nil — it does not apply to existing SCB credit card holders and SC can withdraw it
- Cashback is money credited to the card account: it reaches no airline, no hotel and no transfer partner
- Revolves at 3.75% a month, an APR of 45%
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Statement cashback (₹) 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
Standard Chartered publishes no MCC table for this card. What it publishes is a channel split and one named exclusion, and both are unambiguous: "Get 2%* cashback on your Online* spends, up to a maximum of Rs 1000 per month", "Get 1%* cashback on your other spends, up to a maximum of Rs 500 per month. Fuel transactions are not eligible for cashback." The rules below record only what SC actually states — the fuel exclusion and the two rupee ceilings — rather than inferring a category map from a channel rule. SC's own value chart bounds the whole card at ₹18,000 a year.
- Fuel · excluded SC states it in one line on the card's own page: "Fuel transactions are not eligible for cashback." No surcharge waiver is published on this card either, unlike the Super Value Titanium's 5% fuel rung
- Groceries & supermarkets · capped No category rate exists on this card — grocery spend earns 2% if the transaction is online and 1% if it is not, and both buckets are capped in rupees at ₹1,000 and ₹500 a month respectively
- Dining & food delivery · capped Same channel split: 2% ordering online, 1% at the table, inside the same ₹1,000 and ₹500 monthly ceilings
- Travel (airlines, hotels, transit) · capped A flight or hotel booked online earns 2% inside the ₹1,000 monthly cap; the same booking made offline earns 1% inside the ₹500 cap. SC names no travel exclusion and no travel accelerator on this card
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
₹1,20,000 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. Standard Chartered states what the Standard Chartered Smart earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — the ₹1,20,000 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.
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
6 of 7 MITC rows published
What the MITC actually says — the rates, fees and cutoffs the brochure skips.
Fee ₹499 in year one and ₹499 from year two, the tariffs table reading "Smart Card | 499 | 499 | Nil". The renewal reverses at ₹1,20,000 of preceding-year spend and the first-year charge is currently WAIVED as a Special Offer that excludes existing SCB credit card holders — a revocable promotion, not a published Nil, so the card file carries annualFee only. Cashback is capped in rupees per bucket: 2% on online spends to a maximum of ₹1,000 a month, 1% on other spends to ₹500 a month, and SC's own value chart totals the card at ₹18,000 a year on ₹1,00,000 of monthly spend. Fuel transactions earn no cashback at all. NO LOUNGE ACCESS of any kind. EMI at 0.99%/mo for 3 months with nil processing fee, and an extended interest-free period on the minimum due for the first 90 days after issuance. Visa. Applications are branch or contact-centre only.
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