Unity Bank BharatPe Credit Card
Downgrade2% and eight lounge visits, bought with an automatic EMI at 24% APR.
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. 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 from the first rupee
At ₹1,000 a month — ₹12,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹200 gross (earn ₹200) against its ₹0 fee = ₹200 net — at or above ₹0 from the first rung we price. 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 #432
Why #432 Ranked at the foot of the board on purpose. On the published numbers it looks like a lifetime-free 2% card with eight domestic lounge visits a year — and the mechanism behind the 2% is an automatic EMI conversion at 24% APR that you cannot both avoid and earn on. The rate is real, uncapped and free of merchant-category carve-outs; the way you buy it is the story. Below ₹1,000 a cycle it is a clean 2% with no instalment behind it, which caps the honest, interest-free version of this card at roughly ₹240 a year.
Zillion Coins, and the MITC fixes the arithmetic: "4 Zillion Coins = ₹1". They redeem two ways — across partners on the Zillion programme (zillionrewards.in, whose own terms govern validity), or against the card's outstanding balance in the BharatPe app, capped at ₹5,000 of coins a billing cycle. So ₹1.00 is floor, value and ceiling, with an expiry the bank does not set itself and a revocation clause that takes the balance back if the account runs 45 days overdue or you close the card with coins unspent.
The take
Read the fee table and this is one of the cleanest cards in India: nil to join, nil a year, nil EMI processing, nil foreclosure, nil on rent transactions, 2% back on everything, two domestic lounge visits a quarter and two international a year. Read the EMI clause and you find out how it is paid for. Every billing period's purchases above ₹1,000 are converted automatically into an instalment plan of up to twelve months at 24% APR on reducing balance — that is the product, not a feature you opt into. You can escape it, but only by pre-paying the unbilled amount at least one day before the bill generates, and pre-payment is subtracted from the very figure the 2% is a percentage of. Skip the interest and you skip the reward on the same rupee. Run the illustration the MITC itself prints: ₹9,000 of spend, three instalments, 2% earned = ₹180 of Zillion Coins. The interest on that plan at 2% a month is roughly twice the reward. A card that pays you 2% to borrow at 24% is not a 2% card, and this desk will not print it as one without the sentence after it. One band escapes, and it is the one this desk got wrong until September 2026: a billing period of ₹1 to ₹999 is billed in full, converts to nothing, and still earns the full 2%. Unity used to pay 0% on that band and stopped on 14 August 2025 — the old grid and the new one are printed side by side on the bank's own product page. It is a real escape and a small one: ₹999 a cycle is about ₹240 a year, which is what this card is worth to somebody who will not borrow to earn. What survives the mechanism is worth naming. The lounge benefit is unconditional — no spend gate anywhere in the MITC, eight domestic visits a year on the RuPay programme plus two outside India, on a card that costs nothing to hold. There is no over-limit facility, no cash-advance fee at ATMs because there is no ATM withdrawal, and rent carries no surcharge at all, which is unusual. The 2% is also genuinely unrestricted — Unity states in terms that there are "no restrictions on merchant categories for earning rewards", so the fuel, rent, wallet, utility and gift-card carve-outs that hollow out most Indian cashback cards are simply absent here; the only exclusion is the fees, interest, charges and tax on your own bill, which is to say you do not earn on the interest. If you can hold it, use it for the lounges and the rent, and keep the billed spend under ₹1,000 — that is the version of this card that pays you rather than the other way round. Forex is 3.5%, exactly India's norm, so it is not the card to fly with either.
Your renewal — keep, downgrade or cancel
This card is lifetime free. There is no fee due, no renewal to weigh, and nothing to cancel to save.
Keep, downgrade or cancel
nothing due at the anniversary · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹0 — lifetime free
At your spend
₹6,000 a year at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend
₹12,000 a year at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend
₹24,000 a year at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend
₹72,000 a year at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend
₹1,20,000 a year at ₹60,00,000 of annual spend
Everyday earn plus milestones, with no fee to subtract — the same model as the value panel above, so the two cannot disagree. run your exact spend →
The downgrade
Unity Small Finance Bank 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
- 14 Aug 2025 Unity flattens the BharatPe card's earn grid — the ₹1-₹999 band goes 0% to 2%
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
- Lifetime free — the Key Fact Statement prints Nil against both the joining and the annual row
- 2 domestic lounge visits every calendar quarter plus 2 outside India a year, with no spend gate
- 2% back as Zillion Coins, 4 coins to the rupee, redeemable against the card balance up to ₹5,000 a cycle
- No minimum spend and no merchant-category carve-outs on the 2% — Unity publishes "no restrictions on merchant categories for earning rewards", and fuel, rent, wallet, utilities and gift cards all earn
- No fee to convert a bill to EMI and no foreclosure charge — up to 12 instalments
- No surcharge on rent transactions, where most issuers now charge 1%
- RuPay, so it links to UPI
Watch out
- Every billing period's spend above ₹1,000 converts to EMI AUTOMATICALLY at 24% APR — this is the default, not an option
- The only way out is to pre-pay the unbilled spend at least one day before the bill generates — and pre-payment is netted OUT of the spend the 2% is computed on, so what you dodge in interest you also forfeit in coins
- The MITC's own illustration earns ₹180 on ₹9,000 over three instalments; the interest on that plan is roughly twice the reward
- Foreclose an instalment plan early and the coins on the foreclosed amount are forfeited
- Interest-free earning is capped by arithmetic, not by a clause: ₹999 of billed spend a cycle is the most that escapes the automatic EMI, so about ₹240 a year is the whole of what this card pays a holder who refuses to borrow at 24%
- Forex is 3.5%, exactly India's norm, on a card with lounge access but no other travel benefit
- ₹15 per online cash withdrawal to your BharatPe-registered bank account; ATM cash advance is not available at all
- No over-limit facility for customer-induced transactions
- Coins sit in a third-party programme (Zillion, run by Loyalty Solutions & Research) whose terms set their validity, and the bank may revoke the balance if the account runs 45 days overdue or you close the card
- The RuPay Exclusive Lounge at Delhi T3 domestic departures is excluded from the complimentary benefit by name
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
15 sourced rules
The rare Indian card with NO merchant-category carve-outs, and it is the issuer who says so: Unity's product page, under "2% Cashback worth Zillion Coins upon Bill Repayments (w.e.f 14th August 2025)", lists "No restrictions on merchant categories for earning rewards" as a bullet in its own right. The only exclusion published anywhere is not a category at all — "Earn 2% cashback worth of Zillion Coins on Bill repayments (excluding on Fees, Charges, Interest and Tax components)", i.e. you do not earn on your own bill. The MITC (April 2026, https://unity.bank.in/docs/credit-cards/usfb-most-important-terms-and-conditions.pdf) corroborates by omission: §H prices Zillion Coins as a flat percentage of Bill Period Unpaid Spends with no MCC annexure, no category table and no exclusion list, and the only ceiling in it is on REDEMPTION — "The maximum redemption permitted against the Card outstanding in a billing cycle is ₹5,000 equivalent Zillion Coins", which caps what you can spend the coins on, not what earns them. Both documents read 2026-09-03. So every rule below is `full` and every note says which document forecloses the carve-out an Indian reader is right to expect. What this card charges you is a separate question from what it pays you, and where the KFS (https://unity.bank.in/docs/credit-cards/key-fact-statement-unity-bharatpe-credit-card-final.pdf) adds a surcharge or a markup the note names it — a charge is not an earn cut, and this file must not blur the two. The mechanism that actually prices this card is the automatic EMI conversion at 24% APR on every billing period over ₹1,000; it is category-blind, so it belongs in the card's take and watchOuts, not in a rule here.
per Unity Small Finance Bank T&C · rank every card by spend category →
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?
the route in — no cutoffs published
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.
BharatPe app only — the card is issued by Unity Small Finance Bank under a co-branding agreement with Resilient Innovations Private Limited (BharatPe) and is distributed nowhere else. Unity publishes no income or bureau criterion for it. Add-on cards are not offered: the KFS prints "Not Applicable" against both the add-on joining and add-on annual rows.
Unity Small Finance Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
no MITC row researched for this card yet · filter the board by what you can get →
What's changed for this card
1 dated change
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.
- 14 Aug 2025Unity flattens the BharatPe card's earn grid — the ₹1-₹999 band goes 0% to 2%Zillion Coins paid on a three-rung ladder keyed to Bill Period Unpaid Spends: ₹1-₹999 earned 0%, ₹1,000-₹9,999 earned 1%, and only ₹10,000 and above earned the headline 2%. A ₹1,000-₹9,999 bill also converted to a fixed 3 EMIs → One rate for every band — 2% of Bill Period Unpaid Spends, whether the bill is ₹200 or ₹2,00,000. The ₹1,000-₹9,999 band also stops being locked to 3 instalments and joins the 'up to 12 EMIs, as per opted tenure' rung. A bill under ₹1,000 still converts to no EMI at all and is repaid in full on the due date — it simply earns 2% now instead of nothing
Unity publishes both grids side by side on the BharatPe card's own product page, headed 'Rewards (valid till 13th August 2025)' and 'Rewards (w.e.f from 14th August 2025)', and the second is a single merged cell reading 2% across all three spend bands. The old ladder is the interesting half: it charged the smallest spenders the most, paying literally nothing on a bill under ₹1,000 and 1% up to ₹9,999, so the advertised 2% only ever arrived on a ₹10,000 bill. Flattening it removes the minimum entirely. That matters more than the headline suggests on this particular card, because the ₹1-₹999 band is the ONE band that does not convert to the automatic 24% APR instalment plan — it is billed in full and repaid on the due date. Before 14 August 2025 the only interest-free spend on the card earned zero; since then it earns the full rate, which makes roughly ₹240 a year the honest ceiling on what this card pays a holder who refuses to borrow. Everything above ₹1,000 still earns 2% only as the EMI instalments are repaid, and coins on any amount you foreclose early are still forfeited. Unity announced none of this — the change is dated by the effective-date column on its own page and reproduced in the Key Fact Statement's flat 2% table.
Verified against Unity Small Finance Bank'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 Key Fact Statement — Nil to join and Nil a year, 3.5% forex, the 2% Zillion Coins earn table priced on ALL THREE spend bands, and the 2-per-quarter domestic lounge quota
- official Most Important Terms & Conditions, April 2026 — the automatic EMI conversion at 24% APR, the ₹1,000 EMI threshold, and the coins forfeited on a foreclosed instalment
- official Unity's own credit-card page — "Zero joining and Renewal fee", "2% Uncapped Rewards" and "8 Complimentary Domestic Airport Lounge Access"
- official Unity's product page for this card — "No restrictions on merchant categories for earning rewards", and a 2% earn table covering all three spend bands since 14 August 2025