Citi India guts reward earning on utilities, insurance, and tax
Effective October 12, 2019, Citibank India excluded utility bills, insurance premiums and government payments from reward earning across every major card except the Paytm co-brand and the Cashback card.
Citibank India just deleted the point-farmer’s favorite categories. Effective October 12, 2019, utility bills, insurance premiums and government payments no longer earn reward points — across every major Citi card. Only the Paytm co-brand and the Cashback card escape the rewrite.
These weren’t fringe categories. Utilities, insurance and tax had quietly become the grind of choice for every Rewards Card and PremierMiles holder: large, recurring, unavoidable spend that printed points month after month. Citi rewrote the program terms and switched that engine off in one stroke.
The workaround crowd is already routing spend through wallet top-ups instead — a loophole we’d bet doesn’t survive many more rounds of this. Issuers close doors in sequence, not all at once.
Our take: this is a major nerf, called what it is. If your PremierMiles balance was built on insurance premiums and electricity bills, your effective earn rate just dropped to zero on that spend. Re-run your numbers on genuine retail and travel spend only — and if the card doesn’t clear its fee on that basis, you know the verdict.