Which credit cards still earn on Telecom — September 2026

How is this ranking computed?

THE COUNT FIRST, THEN THE RATE. A card whose published telecom rule zeroes MCC 4814 is not ranked at ₹0 — a zero is a finding, not a position — so it is named below the table with its own rule, and 44 of the 203 we could price sit there. Of the rest: (1) THE RATE is first-tier earn × the card's published telecom treatment × its currency's house ₹/point — the same expression /spends, /spends/telecom and /wallet crown on — raised only where the card's own earn table publishes a telecom rung AND the desk's `telecom` rule in data/mcc.yaml states the same number. 12 ranked cards clear that bar; 11 of those live inside an app or behind a minimum bill, and the row says which. (2) TWO DIFFERENT CEILINGS, kept apart. A RUNG ceiling stops the accelerated rate and the ordinary rate carries on past it; it is converted to ₹ of bills a month and applied, and a rung that says it is capped in units nothing here converts is refused rather than priced as uncapped — 6 cards are ranked at the category rate for that reason. 1 more card publishes a phone-bill rate this desk holds but cannot price — a rung whose ceiling is in units nothing here converts, and no rate outside it — and is named below the table with no ₹ claimed. 3 more cards rank at the category rate for a different reason: the desk's own rule puts their ceiling in ONE bucket shared across categories with no published split, so no ceiling is applied to a phone bill — each row says so. A CATEGORY cap is the other shape: past it the category earns nothing at all, and 27 ranked cards carry one — HDFC's 2,000-Reward-Point monthly ceiling on Infinia, Diners Black, Regalia Gold, Regalia and Freedom, live since 1 September 2024, is this shape. 14 of them are QUOTED AND NOT CONVERTED, deliberately: these caps are written in three mutually unreadable units across the corpus — points, rupees of reward, rupees of spend — and nothing separates the last two, so converting one would turn ICICI Coral's ₹40,000 of monthly SPEND into an ₹80,00,000 ceiling. Converting a points cap through the currency's house value is the other wrong answer: it is exact on Infinia, where raw and effective earn coincide, and overstates Regalia Gold's by 1.53× because that card's catalogue haircut is baked into its earn rate. Write the raw rate AND the desk's own spend-equivalent beside the cap in data/mcc.yaml, and this board converts it. At this bill, not one ceiling this board could read binds on any ranked card. WHAT IS NOT IN THE NUMBER: the bill-payment fee. Not one ranked telecom rule on this desk states a charge this board can quote. The fee clauses these rules do carry name the THRESHOLD another category's charge begins at, and a line is not a bill. Where one is stated it is printed and never netted: the issuers write these against different denominators and the rupee figure beside one is as often the fee's own CAP as its trigger. Nor is a dated recharge cashback OFFER added; /tracker/offers carries those with their end dates. ₹1,500 a month is a postpaid plan and a home fibre line together — the two bills MCC 4814 actually carries — and it is stated because a reference spend decides which ceilings bind. 206 priced cards carry a telecom rule on the fine-print desk; 439 do not and appear on no ranked row here, 0 of which publish a phone-bill rate in their own card file and are named below the table for exactly that reason.