Airport lounge access spend criteria in India: every card, every condition
Which Indian credit cards still give airport lounge access with no spend condition, and what the rest ask: ₹20,000 a month, ₹50,000 or ₹75,000 a quarter.
In this guide 6 sections
2 words below are dotted: tap one for its meaning in the glossary.
Of the 224 personal credit cards Indian banks issue today with free airport lounge visits, 98 still open the door with no spend condition. 102 want a quarter’s spend first — ₹50,000 at Axis, AU and YES, ₹75,000 at ICICI — and 13 want ₹10,000–₹20,000 in the previous month, mostly IDFC FIRST and Scapia.
The rule moved in a hurry. Axis tied its domestic lounges to ₹50,000 of spend in the previous three months in May 2024, ICICI to ₹75,000 in the previous quarter in January 2025, HDFC’s Regalia Gold to ₹60,000 a quarter in July 2026, and IndusInd started counting its premium cards’ spend in April 2026. Below is every card, filed by what it asks of you before a lounge visit counts. Each condition is read from the issuer’s own lounge terms; the card’s page carries the exact wording and the source.
No spend condition
These cards give their lounge visits whatever you spent last month or last quarter. Some carry a different catch — SBI Card’s domestic visits work only at the rooms on its own Set A or Set B list, Priority Pass on several SBI cards is free for the first two years only, and a few cards take a ₹2 validation swipe at the door — but none of them asks for spend.
Every card with no spend condition, by bank
Axis’s top cards sit here because Axis exempts them from its own ₹50,000 rule — Olympus, Burgundy Private, Reserve, Horizon and Primus — and ICICI’s ₹75,000 bar stops short of Emeralde Private Metal, Times Black and both Emeralde cards. The cheapest cards here are the RuPay cards of the public-sector and small banks — Union Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Dhanlaxmi, J&K Bank, Unity — and IndusInd Tiger, which is lifetime free.
Spend in the previous month
| Spend in the previous month | Bank | Cards |
|---|---|---|
| ₹10,000 | City Union Bank | CUB SalarySe Level UP |
| ₹20,000 | Axis Bank | Scapia (Axis Bank) |
| ₹20,000 | Federal Bank | Scapia (Federal Bank) |
| ₹20,000 | IDFC FIRST Bank | IDFC FIRST Gaj · IDFC FIRST Mayura · IDFC FIRST Ashva · IDFC FIRST Diamond Reserve · IDFC FIRST Select · IDFC FIRST WOW! Black · LIC IDFC FIRST Select · IDFC FIRST HPCL Power+ · IDFC FIRST Wealth |
| ₹20,000 | Standard Chartered | Standard Chartered Ultimate |
A monthly bar is easier to plan around than a quarterly one: you know by the statement date whether next month’s visits are open. IDFC FIRST counts the calendar month; City Union Bank and the Axis-issued Scapia count the billing cycle, and both Scapia cards open access three to five working days after the bill. Standard Chartered Ultimate’s ₹20,000 unlocks its monthly Priority Pass visit abroad, not a domestic one.
Spend in the previous quarter
Every quarterly bar, card by card
“Previous quarter” means the calendar quarter before the one you fly in, with two exceptions worth knowing. Axis counts the previous three calendar months, not the calendar quarter, so July’s spend counts toward an August flight. And the cards marked “same quarter” count spend as a milestone inside the quarter: HDFC Millennia at ₹1 lakh in the calendar quarter, Tata Neu Plus HDFC, where ₹50,000 unlocks that quarter’s voucher, and TVS Credit RBL Gold, where ₹50,000 opens the first domestic visit, ₹75,000 the second and ₹1 lakh the international one.
Many of these bars cover only the domestic visits. Kotak White, YES Bank Marquee, YES Bank RESERV and Federal Bank Celesta leave their international visits free of the bar; each card’s page says which visits its bar covers. Axis and BOBCARD waive the bar while a card is new, and on several RBL cards rent, EMI conversions and RBL’s excluded categories do not count toward it.
A deposit or a banking relationship
| Card | What it takes |
|---|---|
| HSBC Premier (Metal) | an HSBC Premier banking relationship |
| Standard Chartered Beyond | ₹50 lakh of funds with the bank; lose it and Priority Pass goes for at least a year |
| Standard Chartered Priority Visa Infinite | no condition on the domestic visits; the international visits need ₹30 lakh with the bank and the card used that month |
| Standard Chartered Super Value Titanium | Premium Banking — ₹15 lakh with the bank, or a monthly salary credit of ₹1.5 lakh — for the Priority Pass visits |
| DCB novio Select | a fixed deposit of at least ₹25,000 |
| IOB novio Platinum | a fixed deposit of ₹10,000, per novio’s product page |
Something other than spend
| Card | The condition |
|---|---|
| AU CA Metal · AU CS | the card must be used during the quarter — no amount |
| AU Ananta | ₹5,000 of flight bookings through AU Rewardz in the same quarter |
| Paytm AU | a return flight of ₹5,000 or more booked on Paytm Travel; each booking issues the lounge passes |
| PNB Kiwi | ₹50,000 of spend, over a period PNB does not state |
Which kind of card to get
If you do not want to track spend at all, pick from the first table. The no-condition cards worth carrying for lounges alone are IndusInd Tiger if you want no fee, HSBC TravelOne at a mid-range fee, and HDFC Infinia or HDFC Diners Club Black at the top. If one card already takes most of your spend, a bar is no cost: ₹20,000 a month on Scapia or ₹50,000 a quarter on an Axis card is spend you were making anyway. The bars to be wary of are the ones above your habit — IndusInd’s ₹1.5 lakh and ₹5 lakh a quarter on its premium cards are designed for very few wallets.
For the free cards on their own, see lifetime-free cards with lounge access. For which card opens which door at your airport, see the lounge map. For cards ranked by lounge visits per rupee of fee, see the lounge ranking.
Method: cards counted are personal (not business) cards still issued on the day this page was built, on application or by invitation, whose lounge row grants any airport visit, domestic or international. Each card’s condition is the gate on that row, filed by a fixed set of rules: a deposit or banking relationship first; then an explicit “no spend gate”; then a usage or booking condition; then a ₹ spend figure of ₹1,000 or more, filed by the period stated beside it; a row with no spend figure whose only note is about the door list, a Priority Pass term or a validation swipe counts as no condition; anything else is listed under “something other than spend”. A spend figure whose period the row does not state is never guessed. Rows that grant a visit with no published count, such as HSBC Privé’s and Union Bank RuPay Platinum’s, are counted here; the lounge map shows which have mapped doors.
Related guides
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Lifetime-free credit cards with lounge access in India
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Which lifetime-free Indian cards give free lounge visits, and the ₹20,000–₹75,000 of spend most ask first. Every card, its visits and its condition.
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Credit cards on a ₹15,000–₹30,000 salary: what banks print
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Every Indian credit card whose bank publishes a salary bar of ₹30,000 a month or less: the bar, the fee, what it earns, and which to pick first.
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Credit cards for the self-employed in India: the published income bars
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Every Indian credit card whose bank publishes an income bar for the self-employed: the yearly ITR figure, the fee, and the cards that need no income proof.
Sources
Every figure in the boxes and tables above is read from our own data on each build . The writing was last checked against it on ; where the two disagree, the data wins. Report an error