Amex India discontinues Reward Multiplier

American Express India has killed Reward Multiplier, and it said so on the programme’s own page: “Effective 30 September’ 2026, the Reward Multiplier program, through which you earn accelerated Membership Rewards points on purchases with select brands and through the e-voucher platform, ShopWise, will be discontinued.” The last earning moment was 23:59 on 29 September. What dies is the whole ladder — 5X on the Platinum Charge and Gold Charge, 3X on Platinum Travel and Platinum Reserve, 2X on the MRCC — across Apple, MakeMyTrip, Tanishq, Nykaa, Myntra, Forest Essentials, Lenovo, AJIO and Farfetch. The number that actually mattered was the cap: 25,000 bonus MR a month, per card, portal-wide, with no sub-cap on anything. At our ₹0.50 house value that was ₹12,500 a month — ₹1,50,000 a year of transferable points — and no other Indian issuer let you print it without carving the allowance into flights, hotels and vouchers first. HDFC’s SmartBuy caps brand vouchers at 3,000 points a month. Amex capped nothing and has now capped everything.

Two things survive and are already being confused with the corpse. ShopWise is alive — the same notice says you “can continue to earn accelerated Membership Rewards points on eligible purchases through ShopWise, an independent platform offering e-vouchers from 200+ brands” — but Amex has published no post-sunset multiplier for it, per card or otherwise, so anyone quoting you a surviving 5X is quoting the old programme. We are carrying no number there until Amex prints one. Reward Xcelerator is a different programme entirely and is untouched: up to 20X on roughly twenty luxury brands, Platinum Charge and up, running to 31 January 2027. It is also niche enough that almost no real spend lands on it, which is precisely why it was never the reason to hold Membership Rewards. Strip the portal out and an Indian Amex earns 1 MR per ₹50 — a flat 1% in a soft currency — with monthly milestones and transfer partners doing all the remaining work.

Our take: this is the biggest single devaluation Indian Membership Rewards has ever taken, and it lands three weeks after Platinum Travel’s milestone ladder was rewritten and on the same board where Amex has stopped accepting new applications altogether. The transfer partners are still the best reason to hold MR — eight live routes at 2:1 into KrisFlyer, Avios and Asia Miles do not care what portal you shopped through. But the multiplier was the engine that got points into the account cheaply, and it is gone. If you were running an Amex purely to farm the portal, the maths just became ordinary; re-run it before the renewal fee lands, not after.