Every card we score, in one place.

Every credit card in India looks good in its own marketing. The useful question is never "is this a good card" but "is this a good card for the way I actually spend" — and answering it means running the same arithmetic over every card on the market, not just the one an issuer is promoting this quarter. That is what this catalogue is: every card we track, scored the same public way, with no paid placements and no affiliate ranking. How we make money sets out why the order you see here is not for sale.

We score every card the same way

A headline reward rate is the least interesting thing about a card. What we compute instead is its net effective annual value — realistic category rewards, plus perks you would genuinely use, plus milestones you would actually reach, minus the effective annual fee and minus forex leakage. Rewards are capped where the issuer caps them, zeroed where a category is excluded, and discounted where an accelerator only pays at a specific merchant list.

That last point matters more than it sounds. Plenty of cards advertise a rate that lands only on a narrow set of merchants, or that stops paying once you pass a monthly cap you would cross by the third week. The methodology sets out the full weighting; the short version is that we care about rupees a year, not points per hundred.

An annual fee is not the fee you pay

Three numbers hide behind "annual fee":

• The joining fee — charged once, sometimes waived on first spend.
• The annual fee — charged from year two onward.
• The waiver threshold — the annual spend above which the fee is refunded, or never charged at all.

A card with a five-figure fee that waives at a very high spend is free to someone who genuinely spends that, and expensive to everyone else. A cheap card with no waiver at all is the reverse. Comparing sticker fees tells you nothing; comparing each card's fee against your spend is the entire exercise, which is what the rewards calculator does with your real numbers.

Lifetime-free cards deserve a category of their own. A card that never charges a fee only has to beat zero to be worth keeping, which is why one usually belongs in a wallet as a floor.

A reward rate means nothing without a point value

"5 points per ₹100" is not a rate. It is a rate multiplied by an unknown. Those points might be worth around a rupee each transferred to an airline programme, or a fraction of that redeemed against the issuer's own product catalogue — a several-fold difference in what the identical card earns you.

We publish what every point in this catalogue is actually worth, per card and per programme, in the point valuation index. Two things follow from it:

• Cashback needs no interpretation. A rupee is a rupee. Cashback is usually the honest choice for anyone who does not want to run a redemption strategy.
• Points are worth only their best realistic redemption. For most Indian reward currencies that means transferring to an airline or hotel partner — and it means the transfer chart, not the earn rate, decides whether a travel card is any good.

Four families, and who each suits

Co-brands are the family most often bought for the wrong reason. An accelerated rate at a retailer you visit twice a year is worth less than a modest flat rate everywhere.

What is money, and what is merely pleasant

Lounge access, concierge and golf are real benefits, and we list them on every card — but we deliberately do not price them as cash in the ranking. A lounge visit you would never have paid for is not income, and treating it as though it were is how a fee-heavy card gets talked into looking better than it is. The lounge finder shows exactly which cards offer what, so you can weigh that for yourself rather than have us weigh it for you.

Forex markup is the opposite kind of number: invisible, and genuinely money. On international spend, the gap between a typical card and a low-markup one compounds quietly across a single trip.

Where to start

If you already know roughly what you are after, filter the catalogue above by bank, tier, fee or reward type. If you would rather come at it from the other end, the category shortlists are our editors' picks, the bank hubs cover each issuer's full range and how it thinks about rewards, and the upgrade paths show where a card you already hold can lead next.

Card terms in India change often — rates get cut, caps appear, categories get excluded. Every dated change we verify is recorded in the change tracker.