Zero Forex Is Half an Answer: Only 41 of 277 Indian Credit Cards Are Net-Positive Abroad

Every "best card for travel" list in India is organised around one number: the forex markup. Find the 0%, done.

That number is half of a subtraction nobody finishes. What a foreign swipe actually costs you is:

net = what the card earns on international spend − the forex markup it charges

Run that across the whole market and the picture changes completely. Of the 277 active cards where we can compute both sides, 41 are net-positive. The other 236 cost you more than they return, or at best break even, every time you use them abroad.

The six cards where "zero forex" means "zero"

Start with the finding that is hardest for us to publish, because we were getting it wrong.

Thirty-four cards in our catalogue carry a 0.00% forex markup, fourteen more than before IDFC FIRST removed the markup on its whole range in September 2026. Six of them exclude international spend from earning altogether. A foreign swipe on those cards costs nothing extra and returns nothing — a net of exactly 0.00%.

Until we ran this, our own pages for those six cards said a version of "spend internationally the way you do at home" — which is the one sentence that is false for them. That has been corrected: each now carries the caveat on the page, derived from the card's own data rather than a hand-kept list, so a card that gains or loses the exclusion is covered the moment its data changes.

We are not saying these are bad cards. Uni GoldX is a perfectly reasonable domestic card, and its issuer's own MITC is where we found the exclusion spelled out. We are saying that if you picked one for travel because of the zero-forex badge, you picked it for a benefit that does not exist in the direction you were told.

Zero forex is worth having. It is worth having when the card still earns.

What the market actually pays abroad

Here are the strongest cards on this measure, best first.

The distribution is the story. The strongest net-positive foreign spend is still something you buy — it sits behind ₹10,000-plus annual fees and, at the top, behind invitation-only private banking. The free end, though, is no longer a two-card affair.

The free end

Eight of the 41 are lifetime free: Scapia at about +2.00%, and seven IDFC FIRST cards — the LIC Select (+1.00%), LIC Classic (+0.60%), WOW! (+0.50%) and the Classic, Wealth, Millennia and Select (+0.38%). Six of those seven joined when IDFC removed its forex markup on every card in September 2026. For the last four, +0.38% is the base rate only: they also pay 10X (about 1.25%) on international spends, which this base-earn measure leaves out, so abroad they do better than the table suggests.

Scapia is the interesting one. On this measure it matches RBL Lumière (₹50,000 a year) and YES Private (₹10,000), and beats HDFC Infinia, Axis Reserve and Axis Atlas. Only five cards beat it, and the cheapest of those carries a ₹20,000 annual fee.

That is worth sitting with. If you are not already paying for a premium card, a free card wins foreign spend, and there are now several to choose from.

The other 236

228 cards are net-negative on international spend and 8 net exactly zero. The worst is the PVR INOX Kotak at −3.50%: a 3.5% markup against a base row that earns nothing abroad.

The pattern that produces a bad number is not a high markup on its own. It is a high markup combined with international spend excluded from earning — you pay the spread and earn nothing against it. HSBC Live+ is the cleanest example: a 1.99% markup and international excluded, netting −1.99%.

One more correction while we are here, because it circulates widely: OneCard charges 1.00% forex, not zero. We see it described as a zero-forex card regularly, including by people with a lot of credibility in Indian card communities.

How this was computed, and what it does not cover

Everything above comes from our own open dataset, and the method is short enough to check.

• The earn side is the card's default reward row — the row an international transaction earns — expressed as an effective percentage: rate × point value. A card paying 5 points per ₹150 at 25 paise a point earns 0.83%, not 3.33%. Getting this wrong is the single most common error in Indian card comparisons.
• The exclusion is read from the card's root-level exclusion list. Where INTERNATIONAL appears, the earn side is zero.
• The markup is the published forex markup, before GST. GST at 18% applies on top of the markup and makes every negative number slightly worse; it does not change the ranking.
• 277 of 280 active cards could be measured. Two publish no forex markup (the Amex Centurion and the CRED Sovereign) and one, the Unity Bank BharatPe card, publishes no base earn row, so nothing can be netted for those three.

⚠ This is base earn only, and for some cards that understates the truth. Cards whose real value comes from transfer partners — Infinia, Atlas, Magnus — can realise more than their catalogue rate through a good redemption, so their figure here is a floor rather than a verdict. Any use of these numbers should carry that qualification; one well-executed SmartBuy booking refutes a sentence that does not.

It also says nothing about acceptance, which is a real cost abroad — a Diners or RuPay card that nets well is not much use where it will not swipe — nor about lounge access, insurance or the exchange rate the network applies before any of this arithmetic starts.

Computed across all active cards in our catalogue as at 27 September 2026 (first published on 15 August 2026 data; recomputed after IDFC FIRST removed its forex markup) and reproducible from the open dataset under CC BY 4.0; the per-field provenance of our card data is published at /data/audit. If a figure here disagrees with your card's terms, tell us — corrections are dated in the public change record. Our general guide to forex markup and zero-forex cards covers the mechanics; this piece is the market-wide arithmetic.