HDFC adds an ₹18L/year retention rule to keep the Infinia
From 1 April 2026, retaining an HDFC Infinia requires ₹18 lakh in annual spend (EMI excluded) or a ₹50 lakh HDFC relationship — separate from, and steeper than, the ₹10L fee waiver.
The Infinia’s earn rate didn’t move. The cost of keeping the metal did. From 1 April 2026, HDFC requires ₹18 lakh of annual spend — EMI transactions excluded — or a ₹50 lakh relationship value, or the bank can downgrade or close the card in 2027.
Read that against the fee waiver and the two are easy to confuse. They are not the same bar. ₹10 lakh a year still waives the ₹12,500 fee. But ₹10 lakh no longer keeps the card: you now need nearly double that in genuine spend, or a small fortune parked with HDFC, just to stay Infinia. For a card that has always sold itself as invite-only and aspirational, this quietly reprices who it is actually for — the person who can waive the fee is no longer automatically the person allowed to hold it.
Our take: this is a retention nerf dressed as nothing — no rate cut, no headline, just a spend gate that separates the merely-eligible from the genuinely-heavy spender. If you can’t clear ₹18L on the card, treat the 2027 review as real and have a landing card ready.