SBI kills reward points on rent across its co-brand cards
Effective July 1, 2023, SBI Card stopped awarding Reward Points on rent payments across its co-branded lineup — Aditya Birla, Apollo, BPCL, the metro cards, Fabindia, IRCTC and Ola Money SBI Cards all lost the category at once. It closed one of the last easy manufactured-spend levers on SBI's ecosystem.
SBI Card just took rent off the table. From July 1, 2023, rent payments earn zero Reward Points — not reduced points, zero — across a wide swath of its co-branded lineup. Aditya Birla, Apollo, BPCL, the metro cards, Fabindia, IRCTC and Ola Money SBI Cards all lost the category in one stroke.
This matters more than the fine print suggests. Rent-via-credit-card had been one of the last easy manufactured-spend levers on SBI’s ecosystem: a big, recurring, points-earning transaction you could route through a card every single month. That lever is now gone.
Note the timing, too. SBI moved a full nine months before rivals followed with their own rent crackdowns. When one issuer kills a category this cleanly, the rest of the market rarely leaves it alone for long.
Our take: if rent was the reason an SBI co-brand lived in your wallet, that reason expired on July 1 — re-run the math on every one of these cards.