The India Credit Card Devaluation Index — October 2026: The 15 Most-Devalued Cards, Ranked

Our devaluation study answered the market question: how often Indian credit cards get cut compared with how often they improve. This index answers the question that follows — which cards, and which banks?

It is the ranked edition of the same dated, sourced change record. Nothing below is opinion: every count is arithmetic over events you can browse, each with its date, its direction and its source. This is the October 2026 edition, computed over the 24 months to 16 October 2026. Editions are never edited after publication, so the September edition stays exactly as it was published, and this one opens with what moved since.

What changed since September

Across the whole market, the 24 months to 16 October logged 234 devaluations against 51 improvements, 4.6 cuts for every improvement, counting each bank decision once. 88% of active cards took at least one cut. The count was 214 in our September figures, from the study that shares the September edition's window. Three things moved it, and they are worth keeping apart:

• 25 new devaluations and 3 improvements are dated between 17 August and 16 October. Axis made ten of the new cuts, more than any other bank. Its 28 August revision touched almost every card it issues: Priority Pass stopped working at domestic lounges, the currency-conversion markup went up, tolls stopped earning rewards, and a new top late-payment slab arrived. Then its 22 September reshuffle of EDGE transfer partners moved Flying Blue, Air India and Qantas into the smaller transfer cap and dropped Club ITC, while bringing Accor back and adding Cathay, Lufthansa and Hilton. Amex made three, two of them major cuts to the Platinum Travel card: a milestone tier deleted, and domestic lounge access now gated behind ₹1 lakh of spend in the previous quarter.
• 15 older cuts, dated August to October 2024, aged out of the 24-month window. That is why IndusInd's count fell from 30 to 28, and why four IndusInd cards left the top 15: each lost two cuts to the window, not to anything new.
• 10 cuts dated before 16 August entered the record, or were reclassified, after the September edition went out. YES gained four of them. That is enough to put it first in the league without a single new cut since August, which is the honest way to read its rank.

The 15 most-devalued cards in India (24 months to 16 Oct 2026)

A card is counted once for every distinct bank act that touched it. "Major" uses the record's own severity flag for that card — the kind of change that materially alters what a card returns, not a rounding of terms. A bank-wide act can be major for one card in it and minor for another, and this column takes each card at its own word rather than crediting it with a sibling's severity.

Distribution behind the table (cards with ≥1 cut, n=246): 1 cut ×46 · 2 ×40 · 3 ×37 · 4 ×49 · 5 ×21 · 6 ×17 · 7 ×19 · 8 ×12 · 9 ×3 · 10 ×2. Median cuts per moved card: 3.5.

Three things stand out. The top is now a tie. The IndusInd Platinum RuPay and the Axis Select each took ten cuts in two years, roughly one every ten weeks; the IndusInd card ranks first only because more of its cuts were major. Axis arrived all at once. It had no card in the September top 15 and now has three — the Select, the Magnus and the Olympus — and four of the fifteen cards here were cut again after the last edition's window closed. YES holds five places, every one last cut on the same day, 15 June 2026: one bank decision landing on a whole portfolio, which is exactly why the issuer view below counts decisions rather than card-hits.

The issuer league table

Counting rule changes here: one bank decision counts once, however many cards it touched. "Cuts / card" divides distinct cuts by the issuer's active cards — the intensity number, and the ranking column. Issuers with fewer than five active cards are footnoted, not ranked; intensity is meaningless on a one-card portfolio.

Small portfolios, footnoted for completeness: CSB made 4 distinct cuts (all major) against 2 improvements on a 1-card book; Utkarsh 4 cuts (none major) against 2 improvements on 1 card; Federal 2 cuts (both major) against 1 improvement across 4 active cards; UNITY 1 major cut across 2 cards; SBM 1 cut on 1 card; Slice logged 1 improvement and no cuts.

YES now leads on intensity: 17 distinct cuts across 12 cards, 1.42 per card, and every card it issues was touched. IndusInd still made the most cuts, 28, sixteen of them major, at 1.22 per card. The biggest movers since September are Axis, from 0.47 to 0.76 on ten new cuts, and BOB, from 0.88 to 1.12 after four more, three of them on the OneCard. HSBC is still the only major issuer whose cards got better more often than worse, 7 improvements against 4 cuts, while Kotak, RBL, Standard Chartered and Amex logged no improvement at all in the window. And the largest books remain the calmest per card: SBI (0.53) and Axis (0.76) run big portfolios at about half YES's pace or less, a reminder that portfolio size and cutting intensity are different things, which is why this table ranks intensity rather than raw counts.

How the index is computed

The inputs are the same public record behind the changes tracker and the market-level study: dated events per card, each with a direction (devaluation, improvement, neutral), a severity flag, and a source. The index adds no model on top — no weights, no rupee estimates, no editorial adjustment. Where the two tables differ is only the counting scope, stated above each table. Severity is the record's own major flag, read per card in the first table and per act in the second: an act counts as major in the issuer league if it was major for any card it touched, which is the right reading of a bank decision but would overstate any single card, so the per-card table never inherits it. No rupee amounts appear in this edition: putting a ₹ figure on each cut requires replaying card states through a valuation engine, which is a different, harder claim than counting documented acts.

Dates deserve one caveat: we date an event from when it became publicly observable, which can be later than the day a bank first notified its own cardholders. "Dated 15 June" means our record dates it there — nothing more. The record also grows backwards as we source older changes, which is why an edition's delta separates new acts from late-recorded ones.

A recurring, citable index

This edition is frozen. The next one will open with the same kind of delta: which acts landed after 16 October, which cards moved in or out of the top 15, which issuers changed pace, and what the record learned about the past.

Everything here is free to cite with attribution. The machine-readable edition lives at /data/devaluation-index.json, which always carries the newest edition; this October file is also kept at /data/devaluation-index-october-2026.json, and the September edition at /data/devaluation-index-september-2026.json, so a figure you cite keeps resolving to the file it came from. The full event-level open dataset (JSON and CSV, CC BY 4.0) sits alongside, and the event record behind every count is browsable, card by card, on the changes tracker. If you are covering a specific issuer and want the cut of this data for it, ask — we are happy to prepare it.