SBI Card kills reward points on rent
From 15 April 2024, no SBI card earns reward points on rent — MCC 6513 is excluded across the portfolio, SimplySAVE to Aurum.
SBI Card has switched off rent. From 15 April 2024, transactions under MCC 6513 — the merchant code for residential rent — earn zero reward points on every SBI card, from SimplySAVE at the bottom of the range to Aurum at the top. No caps, no reduced rate, no exceptions: excluded means excluded.
Rent-via-app was the highest-volume points hack in Indian cards — a way to turn your single largest monthly outflow into a reliable points stream, minus a platform fee. Issuers have been strangling it one by one; ICICI cut rent earn in February, and SBI has now made the exclusion explicit and total. Rent-MCC exclusion is, at this point, industry standard.
Notably, SBI didn’t bother with a fee-plus-partial-earn compromise. Zero points is a cleaner message: stop.
Our take: the rent game is over, and any card strategy still counting on it is a strategy from 2022. If a platform fee buys you nothing back, paying rent by card is pure cost. Move on — the points that matter now come from travel and genuine spend.