Union Bank NEXTERIA
DowngradeUnlimited international lounge access for the whole family — attached to a 1% card with nowhere for the points to go.
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
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 ₹71,000 a month
At ₹71,000 a month — ₹8,52,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹8,000 gross (earn ₹8,000) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹12,499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹8,00,000 a year = ₹8,000 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 #150
Why #150 India's most expensive public-sector credit card, and the only one whose lounge line reads 'unlimited'. Placed on the lounge and the ITC hospitality, not on the points — 1% into a currency with no way out is super-premium spending on entry-level earn.
Union Rewardz points redeem at a flat ₹0.25 through the Union Rewardz app — bill payment or gift vouchers, nothing else. Union Bank names no airline and no hotel partner for any card on its shelf, so there is no better exit to price NEXTERIA's points against. A ₹12,499 card earning 1% is the arithmetic that follows.
The take
NEXTERIA is the most expensive credit card any Indian public-sector bank sells, and the lounge line justifies a good part of it: "Two Family Visit allow per Quarter 1+3 & Unlimited visit for individuals (Domestic & International)" — Union Bank's own words, a bank-curated NPCI programme on the RuPay Ekaa chassis. Unlimited international lounge access is a benefit HDFC charges ₹12,500 for and Amex charges ₹66,000 for, and the 1+3 family quarter is something none of them give you. Stack on ITC 2+1 nights, 1+1 at Peshawari and Avartana, a Hotel Luxe Elite Plus membership across fifteen luxury chains, four golf rounds, US$600 of emergency cash abroad and ₹1 crore of air-accident cover, and the benefit sheet reads like a card twice the price. Then you look at the points. Five reward points per ₹125 — note the ₹125 denominator, not ₹100 — at a flat ₹0.25 apiece is exactly 1%, capped at 10,000 points a month, and those points redeem for a credit-card bill payment or a gift voucher and nothing else. Union Bank publishes no airline partner, no hotel partner and no transfer route on any card it issues. Forex is 3%, which is better than the 3.5% norm but not by enough to matter on a card built for international travel. So the honest read is a lounge-and- hospitality card wearing a super-premium price tag: worth it if you genuinely fly with family often enough to burn unlimited visits, indefensible if you were buying it for the rewards. Downgrade.
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
₹12,499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹12,499/yr
The waiver ₹8,00,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹66,667 a month — and the renewal fee is not charged.
Break-even ₹71,000 a month — ₹8,52,000 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
−₹9,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
−₹6,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹13,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹33,800 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹33,800 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
Union Bank of India 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
- Unlimited domestic AND international lounge visits for the primary cardholder
- 2 family lounge visits per quarter on a 1+3 basis — a benefit no rival offers
- ITC 2+1 nights, 1+1 signature dining and 1+1 spa, all year, no visit limit
- Hotel Luxe Elite Plus across 15 chains — breakfast, upgrade, US$200 of credits
- Fee fully waived at ₹8L of previous-year spend; joining fee waived at ₹3L in 90 days
Watch out
- 1% earn — 5 points per ₹125, not per ₹100 — and hard-capped at 10,000 points a month
- Union Rewardz has ZERO airline or hotel partners; points only pay your own bill
- 3% forex is below the 3.5% norm but still real money on an international card
- ₹4,999 to replace the card — ten times what the rest of the Union shelf charges
- Needs ₹25L gross annual income or a ₹10L deposit lien, and CIBIL 700+
What these points actually fly
No live transfer route takes Union Rewardz 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
4 sourced rules · 4 pay zero
- Fuel · excluded Zero reward points — the MITC's NEXTERIA rewards structure carries its own copy of the exclusion line: "Jewellery, Fuel, Cash withdrawal, Bitcoin, wallet loading, Alcohol, wine shops, Insurance payments". The 1% fuel surcharge waiver, capped at ₹100 a month, replaces the points
- Wallet loads · excluded Zero reward points — "wallet loading" is named in the MITC's exclusion line
- Insurance · excluded Zero reward points — the NEXTERIA copy of the list says "Insurance payments" where the UNICORN copy says "Insurance". Union Bank writes both as categories the list "include"s rather than as a closed set, so this is a floor on the exclusions, not a ceiling
- Jewellery / gold · excluded Zero reward points — jewellery heads the MITC's exclusion line for this card, and is barred from the EMI facility as well
per Union Bank of India T&C · rank every card by spend category →
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹8,00,000 a year is the bar that waives the ₹12,499 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. Union Bank of India states what the Union Bank NEXTERIA earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver and the milestones — the ₹8,00,000 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
17 of 793 tracked doors
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.
Direct application — no invite list, no banking relationship required.
per the official Union Bank of India 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.
One MITC covers the whole Union Bank shelf (version 1.4, effective 25 Sep 2025). NEXTERIA is ₹12,499 in BOTH the joining and the annual column, for primary and add-on alike; joining waived at ₹3L of spend within 90 days of activation, annual waived at ₹8L in the previous year. Card replacement is ₹4,999 — every other Union card is ₹149–₹499. Reward earn is capped at 10,000 points a month per Customer ID excluding milestones, and total milestone points at 15,000 a year. Jewellery, fuel, cash withdrawal, crypto, wallet loads, alcohol and insurance earn nothing. CIBIL 700+ unless the card is issued against a deposit lien.
per the official Union Bank of India MITC · reviewed 10 Jul 2026
What's changed for this card
nothing tracked yet — which is itself a fact
No tracked devaluations or changes yet — this card's history starts here.
Verified against Union Bank of India'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 Product page — "Unlimited visit for individuals (Domestic & International)", ITC and Hotel Luxe benefits, ₹12,499 joining and annual, 5 RP per ₹125, ₹25L income
- official MITC (effective 25 Sep 2025) — NEXTERIA ₹12,499 joining and ₹12,499 annual, fee waiver at ₹8L, 3% forex markup, 10,000-point monthly cap, 15,000-point milestone ceiling
- official Key Fact Statement — the same fee grid as the MITC, NEXTERIA at ₹12,499 in both the joining and the annual column