The India Points Devaluation Index

FY2026 Q4: what the programmes took

Jan–Mar 2026, closed and frozen. 21 dated changes to Indian card and loyalty programmes, each one sourced, each one on the tracker. This page is the arithmetic over them — and the ₹ line underneath, which is deliberately the more conservative of the two.

the denominators, and what this edition cannot see fold that back up

Method v1.0 · window 2026-01-01 to 2026-03-31 inclusive (2025-12-31 exclusive) · the method · the series

FY2026 Q4 · Jan–Mar 2026 · cut share

75.2%

17 cuts against 4 gains — 22.8 severity points against 7.5, at the weights this desk publishes. One cut every 5.3 days across the period's 90.

21

changes logged — the share's denominator

₹0

on 10,000 points in each of 69 currencies

0

currency-moves quantified (0 event · 0 re-mark)

11

of the changes were outright devaluations

  • Two denominators, and they are not interchangeable. The share counts events: one change is one event however many currencies it moved. The rupee line counts currency-moves against a basket of 69 currencies. Nothing on this page mixes them.
  • 95 currencies are excluded from this edition's basket because this desk had not indexed them when the period opened on 2026-01-01. They are left out and counted, never interpolated — a value we did not hold is not a value we can average.
  • The window is bounded by EFFECTIVE dates. A change announced inside this period but landing after it belongs to a later edition; the ones that did are listed at the bottom of this page so the gap is visible rather than silent.

What a point was worth, before and after

Every currency in this edition's basket whose ₹-per-point house value changed inside the window. "Event" means a dated tracker change moved it; "re-mark" means this desk re-priced it — an FX peg drifting, or a re-anchoring against consensus — with no single event behind it. Cards and routes are exposure CONTEXT, printed so you can re-weight by hand; the index itself weights every currency once.

No currency in the basket carried a quantified ₹-per-point move in FY2026 Q4. That is not a claim that nothing was devalued — 17 cuts landed in this period. It is the honest limit of the value line: the archive carries a dated ₹ mark only where a change was QUANTIFIED against a source, so a devaluation nobody could price reads as flat here and counts in full in the share above.

Every change in the window

All 21 of them, in the order they took effect, with the severity weight each contributed to the share above. Cuts and gains both — an index that counted only the cuts could only ever go one way, which is propaganda, not measurement. Each row links to its bracket on the tracker, where the source lives.

devaluation 11fee 1lounge 2partner 3launch 4

2026-01-05 · HDFC Bank · lounge · minor

Business Regalia's lounge visit becomes a voucher — the swipe stops working

2026-01-05 · BOBCARD (Bank of Baroda) · launch · moderate

BOBCARD and Etihad Guest deal two co-brands — the last pipe in

2026-01-06 · IDFC FIRST Bank · launch · moderate

IDFC FIRST launches zero-forex Diamond Reserve card

2026-01-07 · RBL Bank · fee · minor

RBL bolts a 1% fee onto FASTag loads and tolls — the fifth 1% line on its charge sheet

2026-01-10 · SBI Card · lounge · moderate

SBI Card splits domestic lounges into tiers, adds entry fees

2026-01-15 · ICICI Bank · devaluation · major

ICICI caps transport rewards and excludes rent, tax, fuel spends

2026-01-27 · American Express · devaluation · minor

Amex India pauses Travel With Points, its travel-portal redemption

2026-02-01 · American Express · partner · minor

Amex retires Gyftr, moves Reward Multiplier to ShopWise

2026-02-01 · ICICI Bank · devaluation · minor

ICICI gates its BookMyShow movie perk behind quarterly spend

2026-02-01 · HDFC Bank · devaluation · moderate

HDFC throttles how fast you can burn points — 5 redemptions and 50,000 points a month

2026-02-19 · Jammu & Kashmir Bank · launch · moderate

J&K Bank relaunches its card range as Eminent, Platinum and Platinum Privilege

2026-02-27 · Federal Bank / Scapia · devaluation · moderate

Scapia doubles the lounge bar and kills its easiest earn

the other 9 changes in FY2026 Q4

2026-03-01 · Air India · partner · moderate

Air India drops its Bengaluru and Mumbai nonstops to San Francisco

2026-03-03 · Lufthansa Miles & More · devaluation · minor

Discover and Air Dolomiti join Miles & More dynamic pricing

2026-03-09 · SBI Card · devaluation · minor

Paytm SBI Card stops earning on school and education spends

2026-03-09 · SBI Card · devaluation · minor

Paytm SBI Card SELECT stops earning on school and education spends

2026-03-09 · American Express · devaluation · major

Amex Platinum Travel pushes its Taj voucher milestone to ₹7L

2026-03-20 · Federal Bank · launch · major

The Federal Fi credit-card programme ends and reward accrual stops

2026-03-27 · Lufthansa Miles & More · devaluation · moderate

Miles & More raises Lufthansa award prices and surcharges

2026-03-28 · Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer · devaluation · moderate

KrisFlyer quietly cuts its own dynamic 'Access' award rates

2026-03-31 · SBI Card / Etihad Guest · partner · major

SBI kills both Etihad Guest co-brands and force-swaps holders into MILES

Announced here, landed later

Nothing in the archive was announced inside FY2026 Q4 with an effective date after it — or, more precisely, nothing whose announcement date a source actually stated. The desk records an announcement date only where a document carries one; on most rows it is honestly absent, so this list is a floor like everything else here.

How this edition was computed

The share. Every change in the window contributes its published severity weight — major 3, moderate 1.5, minor 0.6 — to the cut side or the gain side, using the same classifier the tracker's seismograph draws with. Cut share is cutLoad ÷ (cutLoad + gainLoad): here, 22.8 ÷ (22.8 + 7.5) = 75.2%.

The basket. 10,000 points of every currency this desk could value on the day the window opened — 69 of them, worth ₹6,08,200 at the open and ₹6,08,200 at the close. The basket is fixed at the open, so a currency indexed mid-period cannot move a number that is supposed to measure the market rather than our coverage.

The whole method is frozen and published at /devaluation-index/method, version 1.0 — including the two weighting schemes it refuses, why fees are in the share and out of the rupees, and the known limits of the classifier. The inputs are data/changelog.yaml and data/valuation-history.yaml, and the series is served as JSON.