How we score every card

What the card is genuinely worth to you in rupees, after everything it costs.

One money figure carries most of the score. For every spend category in your profile we compute: monthly spend × the card’s reward rate in that category × the published point value × 12. Monthly and annual earn caps are applied — a "5% cashback" card capped at ₹1,000/month is scored on the capped number, not the headline. Perks that behave like money — fuel surcharge waivers, milestone bonuses, cashback-style credits — are added in rupees, but only when they apply to you (a fuel waiver counts only against fuel you actually buy; a milestone only to the degree your spend could realistically route through this one card — credit ramps in above the spend gate and reaches full value only when your wallet spends about twice the gate, because reaching a ₹6 lakh milestone means putting ₹6 lakh on this card specifically — and golf and concierge only register on premium tiers). From that we subtract the effective annual fee — ₹0 if your total spend crosses the issuer’s waiver threshold — and the forex markup you would leak on international spend. A few cards hand points back for renewing, but only if the renewal fee is actually charged: HDFC credits the Infinia 12,500 reward points "upon fee realization". We add that back when the fee is billed and not at all when it is waived, which is the honest reading and has a counter-intuitive consequence we do not hide — clearing such a card’s waiver saves the fee but forfeits the points, so the waiver is worth far less than it looks. A ₹12,500-fee card can beat a free card, but only when the math clears the fee. Year one is calculated separately and more strictly: it charges the joining fee rather than the renewal fee, and it does not apply the renewal waiver — that waiver is earned on a year of spending an applicant has not lived through yet. The welcome bonus is added there and only there, so a one-off sweetener never masquerades as ongoing value. Ranking always uses the steady-state figure, never the first-year one.

Cashback people get cashback; miles people get miles.

Full marks when the reward value the card earns you actually lands in the currency you said you want, partial when you have no preference, and next to nothing on a mismatch — points you’ll never redeem are worth nothing to you.

How likely the issuer is to actually approve you.

Cards where your income clearly meets the card’s income bar score full weight. Just under an entry or mid-tier card’s bar, inside its 20% grace band, the card is discounted and shown with a warning. Further under, or under at all on a premium card, it was already removed before scoring (step 1 above), so you never see it. The bar is the issuer’s stated minimum or, where we judge that too low or none is stated, a stricter estimate of our own that we do not publish per card. A credit score, a missed payment, your employment type and how many cards you already hold all move this number when you tell us; anything you leave blank is treated neutrally, never as a penalty.

A small editorial prior, so a thin card can’t win on arithmetic alone.

Our own expert rating for the card — the same 0–5 score shown on its page. It is deliberately the lightest weight in the model and it never overturns the money; it only separates cards whose numbers land close together. A card we haven’t rated is treated as neutral, never marked down. What the rating asks is narrow: how well does this card do the job it is sold for, judged against the cards that do the same job. It is not a verdict on how rich or how premium a card is — 4.5 and up means best in its class, 4.0 means it does its job with a weakness you can plan around, 3.5 means a clearly better card exists at the same fee, and below 3 means we would tell you not to take it. We deliberately keep fee and tier out of it, because the model already prices the money separately and counting a big fee twice would flatter expensive cards. Being honest about it: the ratings we have written so far do drift upward with fee, we have said so in our own engineering notes, and correcting that means re-reading the catalogue rather than nudging numbers.

Counted as a convenience, never as cash.

Lounge access is deliberately kept out of the rupee figure entirely, because a lounge visit isn’t cash and pretending otherwise inflates travel cards. Instead, if you told us you want lounge access, it adds up to four points to the match score — scaled by how much you actually travel — purely to separate cards that are otherwise neck-and-neck. For everyone else it adds nothing at all.

A card you cannot easily use where you are should not headline your list.

If you give us your city and it is outside the metros, two kinds of card lose points — never rupees. Cards on the American Express network lose ten points, because Amex runs its own network in India and offline acceptance thins out quickly beyond the big cities; that applies to every Amex-network card, whoever issues it, and not to an Amex swiped online. Standard Chartered cards lose five, for the branch footprint rather than acceptance. The rupee value is untouched and the card is never removed — the caveat is shown on the result so you can decide, since a Tier-2 reader who spends mostly online may still want the Amex. A metro city changes nothing, however you write it — “Mumbai, Maharashtra”, “Bangalore Urban”, “South Delhi” — and neither does a city we cannot place or no city at all: the penalty applies only to a city we recognise as outside the metros. This exists because a real reader in a Tier-2 city told us two of his five results were impractical for exactly this reason, and until then the city field was collected and read by nothing.