The quiet fee lines: five issuers' transaction-fee and forex changes your statement already shows

Devaluations get written up. Fee lines do not. They arrive as a new row in a Schedule of Charges, a revised column in an MITC, a sentence in the footnote under an earn grid — documents nobody subscribes to, published without a subject line, and effective before anyone notices. Five Indian issuers moved one this year. Every one is already live. Every one is already on your statement.

Here they are, in order of how much they will cost you.

BOBCARD: the lounge gate goes from ₹40,000 to ₹75,000 a quarter

The biggest of the five, and the only one that is not a fee at all — it is the price of a benefit. Eterna, Eterna (FD), Tiara and Varunah Premium gave unlimited domestic lounge access on ₹40,000 of spend in the preceding calendar quarter. That is now ₹75,000. In monthly terms the bar moved from ₹13,333 to ₹25,000, and unlimited domestic lounge access is the entire case for a lifetime-free Eterna.

The dates are where BOBCARD made a mess, so read carefully. A 12 June 2026 notice set ₹75,000 for 15 July. Four days later BOBCARD issued an addendum — “This communication serves as an addendum to our earlier communication on Friday 12th June 2026” — that deferred the lounge clause alone, tabling ₹40,000 as “applicable till 30th September 2026” and ₹75,000 “from 1st October 2026”, while leaving the finance-charge and HPCL clauses at 15 July. Then the Features and Rewards T&C dated 15 July 2026, which postdates the addendum, prints §5.1 Table 1 as “Eterna / Unlimited / Rs. 75,000 in preceding calendar quarter” — no date qualifier, no ₹40,000 anywhere in the document.

The operative document governs. ₹75,000 is the live gate, not a future one. If you found the addendum and think you have until October, you do not.

The same notice also took Eterna and Tiara’s finance charge from 3.25% to 3.75% a month, and withdrew the Air and Non-Air Accidental Death Cover from twenty product variants.

RBL: a fifth 1% fee row, and this one taxes FASTag

RBL’s live Schedule of Charges (RBL-CC-SOC-V2-12-12-2025) now runs five separate 1% transaction-fee rows. The newest, verbatim: “w.e.f. January 07, 2026, a 1% fee will apply on transactions done for Fastag loading or toll payment transactions above INR 10,000 per transaction per Card”, on MCC 4784, 4111 and 4131.

It joins four that were already there:

• Rent (MCC 6513) — 1% on every transaction, no floor at all
• Fuel and auto — 1% per transaction above ₹10,000, capped at ₹3,000
• Education via third-party apps — 1% through Cred, PhonePe, Paytm, Mobikwik and a long “not limited to” list; school and college websites and their own POS machines are expressly exempt
• Utility (MCC 4900) — 1% above ₹50,000 a month per card

All five carry GST at 18% on top. And here is the structural trap, which matters more than any single rate: these are fees, and RBL lists them nowhere near the reward exclusions. The Schedule of Charges and the card terms never reference each other, and no product page sums them. A category can cost you 1% and earn you nothing.

The fee rows are scoped by merchant category code, not by card, so this reaches every one of the roughly sixty variants RBL prices by name. One free fix: if you top FASTag up in ₹15,000 lumps, split it. Under ₹10,000 a transaction, the fee does not apply.

IndusInd: the DCC fee doubles to 2% — but only on half the shelf

Read this as a split, not an introduction. IndusInd’s MITC already printed a flat “1% Mark-up fee plus taxes” on dynamic currency conversion for every card. From 15 June 2026 it forks, and which fork you are on has nothing to do with what you paid.

2% + GST: Platinum RuPay, Platinum, Platinum Aura Edge, Duo, ePay Amex, Legend, Next, EazyDiner Platinum, Iconia Visa, Platinum Aura Edge (For Government Sector), Platinum Aura, Platinum Select, Signature, Samman, Tiger, Jio-bp Mobility+ and the CRED IndusInd RuPay card.

1% + GST: Pioneer Legacy, Indulge, Celesta, Crest, Pinnacle, Avios Visa Infinite and EazyDiner Signature.

Not levied at all: Pioneer Private, Pioneer Heritage, Indus Solitaire.

Note EazyDiner sits on both lists at different rates — Platinum pays 2%, Signature pays 1%. The Tiger is the one that stings: it is sold on a 1.5% forex markup against India’s 3.5% norm, and 2% DCC stacks on top of that markup the instant a foreign terminal offers to bill you in rupees. The fix costs nothing. Always choose the merchant’s local currency abroad.

One card is genuinely unresolved. Iconia AMEX appears on neither list, so its post-15-June rate is published nowhere, and we claim no number for it.

A word on the document, because it fought us. IndusInd’s live MITC_Premium URL is non-deterministic — consecutive fetches return two different bodies at random, both stale editions that predate this revision and both still printing the flat 1%. Anyone reading the live path today will “discover” that the 2% is wrong. It is not; they are reading a superseded PDF.

YES: forex up on almost the entire range

Also 15 June 2026, also from an MITC rather than an announcement. YES Bank re-priced foreign spend across nearly its whole shelf, and the moves are deliberately uneven:

Card	Before	After
Reserv, YES First Preferred	1.75%	2.00%
Elite+, Essence	2.75%	3.00%
Select, Ace	2.75%	3.50%
Prosperity Business	2.50%	3.00%
Prosperity / POP-CLUB / ANQ Phi	3.40%	3.50%

SELECT took 75 basis points in one step, which moves it from below the Indian norm to exactly at it — while the product page still lists the markup as though it were a feature. Only the top escaped: YES Private and Private Prime hold 0.50%, the lowest markup on any Indian credit card, and Marquee holds 1%. A separate 1% DCC charge sits on top of all of them.

AU: two more merchant categories stop earning

AU has now run five exclusions in three years, and not one arrived as a notice with a subject line.

Transportation, from 1 April 2026. One sentence in the footnote under the earn grid: “With effect from 1st April 2026, Reward Points accrual on Transportation Merchant Category Codes will be discontinued.” Transportation used to be a CS-card quirk — the CS exclusion list carried it and the otherwise identical CA card did not. It is no longer a difference. Xcite, Xcite Ultra and Altura+ carry it too. One carve-out survives, and it is the travel card: AU’s own MITC states “ixigo AU co-brand credit card variants are excluded from Transportation category charges”.

The ixigo co-brand’s own MCC rewrite, w.e.f. 22 December 2024, which this desk had read into the card file and never onto the tracker. Rent (MCC 6513), education and government across fourteen MCCs, BBPS and every international transaction go to Nil. Utility and telecom (4812, 4814, 4899, 4900) and insurance (5960, 6300) drop to 1 Reward Point per ₹100 — a reduced rate, not an exclusion — with insurance capped at 100 points per transaction, so a premium above ₹10,000 earns nothing more.

The international row is at least an honest trade: AU withdrew it explicitly to fund the 0% forex markup it launched in December 2023, still the only 0% row on any AU card. The insurance row is the interesting one, because AU’s live product page still carries an undated bullet reading “Fuel & rent transactions, insurance and wallets are excluded from Reward Points spends calculation” — which is not what the dated, MCC-level instrument says. The specific dated document wins; the marketing page is stale.

Against ixigo AU’s base 2.5 points per ₹100, a reduced row is a 60% haircut on what survives — on points worth ₹0.50 only as ixigo money, inside ixigo’s app, minus ₹99 plus GST every time you redeem.

What to actually do

1. Choose local currency abroad, every single time. DCC is the only fee on this page you can decline at the terminal, and IndusInd just doubled it on the cards most likely to be in a traveller’s wallet.
2. Check your BOBCARD quarterly spend before the quarter ends, not after. ₹75,000 between July and September buys unlimited lounges from October; ₹74,000 buys none.
3. Split FASTag top-ups under ₹10,000 on an RBL card, and stop routing rent through it entirely — that row has no floor.
4. Re-read your forex markup if you hold a YES card. The reviews and the product pages have not caught up.

A footnote from the same sweep, outside the five because it is not a fee at all: SBI Card’s own product record now leads with “W.e.f. Dec’25, Ola Money SBI Credit Card has been discontinued”, with holders “replaced with the equally-rewarding SimplyCLICK / SimplySAVE SBI Credit Card”. That is a forced migration, and it ends the last of the big Indian cab co-brands. If you held one, the useful move is not about the card: everything it ever paid you went into an OLA Money wallet governed by Ola’s terms, not onto the card account. Closing the card does not fetch that balance back. Open the wallet and spend it down.

Every figure above is logged on the tracker with its issuer document.