How we value points and rank cards.

Transferable bank currencies are anchored at the community standard of 1 partner airline mile ≈ ₹1 — the same basis the rest of the Indian points ecosystem quotes when it says "Atlas 4%, Infinia 3.3%". We use it deliberately: our headline reward rates are comparable with every number you'll read elsewhere, and the anchor itself is conservative — saver business-class redemptions routinely clear ₹2 per mile.

The single house value never tells the whole story, so every one of the 70 currencies in the Valuation Index also carries a floor (the guaranteed portal/cashback rate — what you get with zero effort) and a ceiling (the realistic best-case sweet spot — not a unicorn redemption). Discipline and sweet spots live in that range, not in an inflated headline. Marketing rates don't appear anywhere on this site.

One invariant runs through every card file

Each card's effective earn (earn.base, points per ₹100) times its currency's house ₹/point equals its headline reward rate: base × value ≈ rate. Redemption haircuts and transfer markups are baked into the base, so the headline is honest by construction. Two live examples:

• HDFC Regalia Gold earns 2.5 RP per ₹100, but its points cap out at ₹0.50–0.65 against HDFC's ₹1.00 house value — a 35–50% haircut. We book the base at 1.63, so 1.63 × ₹1.00 ≈ 1.6%. The haircut is priced in, and the card page says so.
• Axis Magnus for Burgundy earns 6 EDGE RP per ₹100 but transfers at 5:4 — double the standard 5:2 — so its base is booked at 12 against the ₹0.40 house value: 12 × ₹0.40 = 4.8%. The velvet-rope premium is priced into the card, not smuggled into the currency.

The ranking starts with a computed realistic annual value at three spend profiles — ₹1L, ₹3L and ₹5L a month — using each card's real earn tiers, milestone and monthly bonuses and fee waiver, valued at the house ₹/point. On top of the everyday rate we credit each card's best accelerator (SmartBuy, iShop, 5X online, app-hotel portals) on a realistic ~20% of spend — less for narrow or capped boosters — because a disciplined cardholder really does route some spend there. We assume 20%, disclosed, not the issuer's "up to" fantasy applied to everything; the calculator shows your everyday value and lets you tune the mix to your own wallet.

On top of the fair-value math we weigh currency quality (transferable beats closed-loop), transfer-partner strength (all 128 live routes are in the optimizer), lounge and premium benefits, and access gates — a card you can't get, or can only hold behind a relationship threshold, ranks accordingly. Hypothetical "up to" numbers count for nothing. When an issuer nerfs a card, its rank moves; the tracker is the audit trail.

Bundled memberships are surfaced, never counted. Club Marriott, Accor Plus, Epicure and friends appear on card pages and in the membership matrix at honest ₹ values — but none of that ₹ enters net annual value or a rank. A dining club is worth ₹0 to a holder who never uses it, and folding opt-in perks into the headline would quietly reorder the rankings on usage assumptions we can't defend. The math above counts only what every holder earns.

Every card gets exactly one of three calls — no fence-sitting. Because our card pages publish machine-readable review markup, the scale behind those stars is disclosed here: the Review structured data on each card page maps our verdict onto a 5-point rating exactly as follows.

One org-authored review per card, no invented star counts, no aggregate ratings we don't have. The rating you may see in search results is this editorial verdict — nothing else.

The Portfolio Score grades your whole deck — not one card — on a 0–100 scale. It is one published formula, three pillars, no black box:

Score = round(100 × (0.60 × E + 0.20 × C + 0.20 × R))

E — Earning efficiency (60%)

Your deck's net annual ₹ at your spend, divided by the best possible deck's. We allocate each spend category to whichever of your cards earns most on it, run the same tiered-earn + milestone + monthly-bonus engine as the calculator, and subtract fees — a fee counts as waived only when the spend we actually routed to that card clears its waiver, not when your total spend does. The denominator is the best same-size deck buildable from the full catalog, found by exhaustive enumeration up to size four. E is clamped to [0,1].

C — Coverage (20%)

The spend-weighted share of the 12 MCC categories — fuel, rent, government, utilities, insurance, education, wallet loads, groceries, telecom, jewellery, forex, UPI — where your deck earns fully. A category scores 1 when at least one card earns full rate, 0.5 when the best treatment is reduced or capped, and 0 when it's excluded — or when the issuer never published the rule, because an unpublished rule is a rule you can't rely on. Weights are the picker's standard spend mix, so a hole in groceries costs you more than a hole in jewellery.

R — Resilience (20%)

Whether the points you're earning will still be worth something when you redeem them. R = 1 − 0.7 × d − 0.3 × x, where d is the share of your earn flowing into currencies that took a program-wide devaluation in the last 18 months (per our tracker — dated, sourced events, not vibes) and x is the share flowing into currencies whose points die within roughly 24 months of earning them.

Grades, percentile, leak

S ≥ 90 · A ≥ 75 · B ≥ 60 · C ≥ 45 · D ≥ 30 · F below

Your percentile is your score's position among every deck of your size drawn from the strongest 34 cards at your spend band — 52,955 enumerated decks of size 1–4 per band, scored at build time (the pool cap keeps the arithmetic honest AND tractable). It is arithmetic, not survey data; nobody was polled. Your leak is the ₹ gap between your deck's net annual value and the optimal same-size deck's — the rupees you're leaving on the table per year by holding these cards instead of those.

Worked example — illustrative

Take a common two-card deck: HDFC Infinia + Axis Atlas, ₹2L/month spend. The numbers below are illustrative — a plausible walk-through, not your statement.

Why these weights

Earning is 60% because it is the only pillar denominated in rupees — it's the thing you actually take home. Coverage and resilience are risk modifiers: they tell you how fragile that rupee number is across your categories and across time, so they split the remaining 40%. That's an editorial choice, not a law of nature — we made it, we own it, and if we ever change it, the tracker and this page change on the same day.

What the score does not know

The whole thing runs in your browser. Your spend, your deck, your score — nothing is uploaded, logged or stored anywhere but your own tab.

Everything the site shows lives as version-controlled, human-curated data — every edit is a reviewable diff. Official issuer terms come first: card facts are verified against T&C and MITC PDFs and program pages, not forum hearsay. The devaluation tracker holds 249 dated events spanning 1961–2026, and every single one carries a source URL you can click.

Valuation history is held to the same standard: a historical ₹/point is published only when a tracked event quantifies the change, each point names its event and shows its arithmetic, and we always take the most conservative figure in a stated range. Currencies with no quantified history get a single current point — we never invent a curve to make a sparkline look busy.

Our news desk is AI-written, and we'd rather tell you than have you guess. It is a phraser over a fact base, not a writer: the generator turns our own curated tracker events into posts and has no license to state anything that isn't already in the data — no invented cards, rates, fees, partners or dates.

Five fences, in order, every run:

1. Grounded — input is our curated tracker facts, nothing else.
2. Schema-valid — output that fails validation is discarded.
3. Cited — no source URL, no post.
4. Deduped — near-duplicates of recent items are skipped.
5. Audited — every attempt is logged with model, prompt hash and decision; rollback is a delete.

Rankings, valuations, verdicts and every number on this page are human-curated data — the machine phrases; it never decides.

No affiliate links. No display ads — not now, not later. Nobody pays for a rank, a verdict, or a kind word; rankings are derived from the data above and nothing else. That's a locked, written decision (ADR 0003), not a vibe. If that ever changes, the rule is already on the record: prominent disclosure on every page carrying a link, zero commercial influence on rankings or verdicts, and this page updates first. Until then, the only thing we're selling is the verdict.

Every program hub and the valuation index carry a nerf-risk chip: stable · watch · elevated · high. It is not a prediction and not an opinion — it is a weighted sum over the 249 dated, sourced events in the devaluation tracker, attached to each currency by the same inference that builds its nerf log. Same data, same page, one number.

The formula, in full

score = max(0, Σ cuts − Σ buffs − quiet). Each cut-side event contributes kind × severity × attach × decay:

• Kind — devaluations count 1.0; a hostile partner event (a purge, a cut, a ratio clipped) also counts 1.0, because losing a transfer route IS a devaluation of transfer value; fee hikes 0.5; lounge cuts 0.4. Additive partner news, launches and mergers count zero.
• Severity — major 3, moderate 1.5, minor 0.6, exactly the tracker's own severity call.
• Attach — a first-party program event weighs 1.0; an issuer-wide change 0.75; a single-card event reaching the currency through its issuer 0.4; a bystander mention inside another ecosystem's event 0.5.
• Decay — a half-life of 18 months: the last 12 months weigh most (≥0.63), a 5-year-old cut is worth about a tenth of a fresh one. Time is measured to the newest tracker event, never the clock — the grade is a pure function of the data.

Buffs earn back 0.4× their weight — credit, never a full pardon. A quiet streak earns 0.25 per year since the last major cut, capped at 1.5; a never-nerfed program gets the full cap. Thresholds: below 1 stable, below 2.5 watch, below 4.5 elevated, and 4.5 or above high.

Today that grades the 70 currencies as 59 stable, 4 watch, 3 elevated and 4 high (anchored to the tracker's newest event, 2026-07-10). Every chip's one-line "why" names the driving events, and npm run qa recomputes every grade independently and fails the build if a rendered chip disagrees with this formula.

The honest caveat: past cuts are not future cuts. This is a track-record grade — how a program has actually treated its members, weighted for recency — not a forecast. A clean sheet can end overnight; Axis proved that in April 2026 with zero days' notice. Read it the way you'd read an issuer's history before signing up: as character evidence, not prophecy.