YES Bank ACE
DowngradeThe cheapest fee on the YES shelf, and the points to match.
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 →
Breaks even only by erasing its fee at ₹5,000 a month
At ₹5,000 a month — ₹60,000 a year — on the everyday mix this card returns ₹300 gross (earn ₹300) against a fee of ₹0 — the ₹499 is waived, the spend having cleared ₹50,000 a year = ₹300 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.
1 notes on the card itself: how it is issued
Best real exit: Air India Maharaja Points at ₹0.05/pt (15:1 transfer).
The take
ACE is YES Bank's floor: ₹499 to take out, reversed if you spend ₹5,000 in the first month, ₹499 to renew, reversed at ₹50,000 a year. Almost anyone clears both, so treat it as a free card and judge it on what it earns. What it earns is 8 YES Rewardz per ₹200 online, 4 per ₹200 offline and 2 per ₹200 on the bank's "Select" bucket. At the ₹0.25 a point YES Rewardz fetch inside the bank's own flight-and-hotel portal that is 1.0%, 0.5% and 0.25% — and outside that portal, on statement credit or vouchers, the point collapses to ₹0.10 and every one of those numbers more than halves. There is no lounge access: ACE does not appear in the MITC's domestic lounge threshold table or its international entitlement paragraph. Forex went to 3.50% on 15 June 2026, the same day rent, wallet, fuel, UPI, government, marketing, insurance, education, railways, tolls, ferries and jewellery all stopped earning outright. What is left is an unobjectionable first card with a fee you will not pay and a rate you will not notice.
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
₹499/yr at stake · 5 spend bands
The charge ₹499/yr
The waiver ₹50,000 of spend in the year before renewal — about ₹4,167 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, and it gets there by erasing the fee at the waiver rather than out-earning it.
At your spend
₹1,400 a year, net of the fee, at ₹3,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹2,900 a year, net of the fee, at ₹6,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹5,700 a year, net of the fee, at ₹12,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹17,100 a year, net of the fee, at ₹36,00,000 of annual spend — this clears the waiver, so no fee is charged
₹28,500 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
YES 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
- 23 Sep 2026 Axis EDGE brings Accor back, drops ITC, and adds Cathay, Miles & More and Hilton a program these points reach
- 25 Aug 2026 Vietnam Airlines Lotusmiles opens a broad SkyTeam status match — up to Elite Plus a program these points reach
- 20 Aug 2026 IHG Hotels & Resorts becomes a Maharaja Club earning and conversion partner a program these points reach
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
- ₹499 joining reversed at ₹5,000 in the first month; ₹499 renewal reversed at ₹50,000 a year
- 8 YES Rewardz per ₹200 on online shopping — 1.0% at the portal rate
- The lowest published fee on YES Bank's consumer shelf
Watch out
- YES Rewardz pay ₹0.25 only on portal flights and hotels; statement credit and vouchers pay ₹0.10, halving every rate above
- No lounge access of any kind — ACE is in neither of the MITC's lounge tables
- Forex is 3.50% since 15-Jun-2026, plus 1% dynamic currency conversion
- Rent, wallet, fuel, UPI, government and marketing earn nothing; insurance, education, railways, toll, ferry and jewellery joined them on 15-Jun-2026
- Utility points are capped at 150 a statement cycle — the bottom tier YES sets, shared with Select and Essence
- The Air India Maharaja Club exit at 15:1 pays about ₹0.07 a point, less than not transferring
What these points actually fly
YES Rewardz (YES CC Rewardz) move to Air India Maharaja Points — and that programme prices every award dynamically. There is no published chart to quote, so we quote nothing: an estimate is not a seat.
what the cards that DO reach a chart can fly — 2,196 corridors priced →
What earns, what doesn't
2 sourced rules
YES publishes the one thing that decides a bill-payment card in its MITC (v18, 07-Aug-2026): a per-variant table of "Reward Points Capping on Utility Spends per statement cycle", and Ace sits in its lowest band at 150. YES's "Utility & Service" block is unusually wide — MCC 4900, 4814, 4899, 4816, 5261, 7349, 9402, 7211, 8999 and the building trades — so telecom, laundry, landscaping and postal services all draw on that same 150-point ceiling. Three bank-wide limits the same MITC sets and every YES card inherits: rent transactions are CAPPED AT 5 PER 30-DAY PERIOD, third-party wallet loads above ₹2,000 carry a 1% fee, and education paid through a third-party site carries 1% (free paid to the institution). This row states only what the MITC states — YES's earn-exclusion list lives on a product page that renders in JavaScript and is a JS shell in the Archive too, so it could not be re-read this session.
- Utilities (electricity/water/gas) · reduced A Select category at 2 points per ₹200 vs 4 points per ₹200 on ordinary offline spend, and reward points on utility spend stop at 150 a statement cycle — the lowest band in YES's own table, shared with Select, YES Prosperity Rewards, YES Prosperity Business, the RuPay Virtual card and Essence, against 1,250 on Marquee and no cap at all on YES Private. On top of the cap, YES charges a 1% fee + GST on every utility transaction once cumulative utility spend passes ₹25,000 in the previous calendar month (Ace is in the ₹25,000 band, not the ₹50,000 or ₹1,00,000 ones, and the fee is capped at ₹5,000 a transaction)
- Telecom · capped Shares the 150-point utility ceiling; shares the ₹25,000 fee threshold too — YES files telecom inside "Utility & Service" (MCC 4814 and 4816 sit in the same block as 4900), so a mobile bill and an electricity bill compete for the same 150 points a cycle
Does your spend count toward the fee waiver?
not published — and we say which
₹50,000 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. YES Bank states what the YES Bank ACE earns and does not earn, but has not published which spend categories count toward the fee waiver — 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.
Where the miles go
1 program
Ratios read card points : partner miles — 2:1 means 2 points become 1 mile. Never the other way round.
every YES Bank route, side by side → · the YES Rewardz (YES CC Rewardz) hub →
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?
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.
YES Bank publishes no income or age cutoffs for this card. Blank means blank — we don't invent numbers to fill a grid.
per the official YES Bank 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.
Joining and annual membership fee both ₹499 + GST: waived in year one at ₹5,000 of spend within a month of card set-up, and at renewal on ₹50,000 in the 12 months before the anniversary. ACE was earlier known as YES Prosperity Rewards Plus — the MITC says so in its own rename note, which matters because the grid also still carries a separate YES Prosperity Rewards row at ₹399. The FD-backed twin, “Ace issued against FD”, prices identically but sits in the 2.49%/mo APR tier instead of 3.99%. Utility spends attract 1% + GST once they pass ₹25,000 in the previous calendar month, capped ₹5,000 a transaction. No domestic-lounge row: the threshold table names Elite+, Select, BYOC, Prosperity Business, Wellness Plus and Zagg, and not ACE.
per the official YES Bank 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.
- 23 Sept 2026Axis EDGE brings Accor back, drops ITC, and adds Cathay, Miles & More and HiltonAccor and Marriott off the grid since 2 April 2026; Club ITC live; no Cathay, Miles & More or Hilton → Accor live at the punished rates; ITC removed; Cathay, Hilton and Miles & More live; Marriott still gone
Axis's own Travel EDGE terms, re-read 25 September 2026, already show the grid that went live on 23 September. Accor ALL is back, and not at the old Atlas 1:2: EDGE Miles convert at 2:1 (Olympus 1:2) and EDGE Rewards at 5:1, with Magnus for Burgundy at 5:2 and only Burgundy Private still at 5:4. Club ITC is off the table. Three partners are new. Cathay Asia Miles sits on that same punished grid. Hilton Honors is the ordinary one: EDGE Miles 1:2, EDGE Rewards 5:2, Burgundy 5:4. Lufthansa Miles & More is the exception on Atlas, which converts 1:1 there while every other standard airline on that card is 1:2; the EDGE Rewards side of Miles & More is the ordinary 5:2. Marriott stays removed. Qatar Privilege Club was already back. Flying Blue, Air India and Qantas moved into Group A, which is the capped group. The Axis Rewards credit card's Amex network is advertised as joining-fee and annual-fee nil for a limited period; there is no separate Amex variant on this board, so that offer is not modelled as a fee change.
- 25 Aug 2026Vietnam Airlines Lotusmiles opens a broad SkyTeam status match — up to Elite Plus
- 20 Aug 2026IHG Hotels & Resorts becomes a Maharaja Club earning and conversion partner
- 6 Aug 2026MaxCoins' full transfer catalogue surfaces — Accor at 2:1 re-prices the coin to ₹1.08
- 3 Aug 2026SBI drops Etihad Guest from the MILES transfer table — the last SBI door into the programme
- 2 Aug 2026Flipkart SuperCoins into Maharaja Club improve to 2:1
- 26 Jul 2026Air India's quiet network retreat: Tokyo moves, Paris and San Francisco go, Malé pauses
- 15 Jun 2026YES's ₹100 redemption fee reaches Marquee and Reserv
Every YES Bank change we've dated → 7 events since 2023, 6 of them nerfs — worst year 2026.
Verified against YES Bank's own documents on · the net-annual-value engine, at our house ₹/point
Every document behind this page — 2 of them, each with the day we read it
- official Product page — 8 YES Rewardz per ₹200 online, 4 offline, 2 on Select categories; ₹499 first year reversed at ₹5,000 and ₹499 renewal reversed at ₹50,000; the 15-Jun-2026 exclusion list
- official MITC (CMITC_V18_07082026) — ACE at ₹499/₹499 with ₹5,000 and ₹50,000 waivers; forex 3.50% from 15-Jun-2026; utility points capped at 150 a statement cycle