April 2026 brought another wave: SBI Cashback capped, Axis Magnus gutted, Airtel Axis lounge access gone, HDFC Infinia eligibility tightened. This is not a coincidence or bad luck. There are five structural reasons this keeps happening, and understanding them is the only way to stop being surprised by the next one.
In the first two weeks of April 2026, four major card programs announced or enacted significant cuts. The pattern was the same as the waves before it: a policy update email, a T&C revision buried on the bank website, and a change that quietly erases months of accumulated value for cardholders who were not paying attention.
| Card | What changed | Effective |
|---|---|---|
| SBI Cashback CardLive | 5% cashback capped at Rs. 2,000/month online (previously Rs. 5,000/month). New exclusions: government payments, gaming, tolls. | April 1, 2026 |
| Axis Magnus / Atlas / Horizon / OlympusLive | Accor, Marriott, and Qatar Airways removed as reward transfer partners overnight. | April 2, 2026 |
| Airtel Axis Bank CardLive | Lounge access removed. Swiggy and BigBasket benefits discontinued. Cashback caps restructured. | April 12, 2026 |
| HDFC InfiniaLive | Eligibility tightened: Rs. 18L annual spend or Rs. 50L total relationship value required to retain the card. | April 1, 2026 |
| HDFC Regalia GoldUpcoming | Reward earn rate cut (4 pts per Rs. 150 to 5 pts per Rs. 200), and lounge access tied to a quarterly spend. | May 15 / Jul 1, 2026 |
The same pattern played out in 2024 with HDFC SmartBuy restrictions, Amex MRCC cashback cuts, and IndusInd Legend devaluations. And in 2023 with Flipkart Axis and SBI SimplyCLICK. The April 2026 wave is the latest chapter of a story that has been running for three years.
This is the one nobody says out loud. Banks launch cards with rewards they know are unsustainable. The goal is customer acquisition, not long-term value delivery. Once you are on the card, your credit history is tied to it, your autopays run through it, and switching feels like effort. Banks know that most users will absorb a devaluation rather than act on it. The generous launch benefits were always a cost of acquisition dressed up as loyalty. SBI Cashback, Axis Magnus, HDFC Regalia Gold: every one of them followed this arc. The only question was timing.
In November 2023, the Reserve Bank of India raised the risk weight on credit card receivables from 125% to 150% for scheduled commercial banks. Risk weight determines how much capital a bank must hold against each rupee of outstanding credit. At 150%, banks need to set aside more capital per card account than before. That capital has a cost. Banks do not absorb that cost out of goodwill; they find it somewhere else. Rewards budgets are the softest target because cuts can be implemented quietly, via a policy update email, with no regulatory approval required.
Every time you swipe a credit card, the merchant pays a fee to their bank, which passes most of it to your bank as interchange. In India, credit card interchange is a percentage of each transaction, set by the card networks and not published as a single rate. Your bank uses a portion of that to fund the points, cashback, and miles it gives you. The problem: UPI has absorbed a large share of everyday transactions that used to go through credit cards. Those UPI transactions carry zero MDR for most merchants. The total interchange pool available to fund rewards is smaller than it was three years ago, even as the number of credit cards in circulation has grown.
Between 2019 and 2022, fintechs and challenger banks were burning investor capital to acquire credit card users at any cost. Rewards were a customer acquisition tool subsidised by venture funding, not by sustainable card economics. That era ended. Investors now demand a path to profitability. The rewards that were funded by growth capital have to be funded by actual card revenue, and actual card revenue cannot support them. What looked like generosity was a subsidy. The subsidy has been withdrawn.
A small but significant cohort of sophisticated users found ways to generate reward points on transactions that earn the bank near-zero interchange: rent payments routed through platforms like NoBroker or CRED, wallet top-ups, government tax payments, toll payments. These are low-interchange or zero-interchange transactions. Banks were paying rewards on them while earning almost nothing. The exclusions rolling out now (rent, government transactions, gaming, tolls) are not arbitrary. They are banks closing the specific loopholes that cost them the most. The lounge access crackdown follows the same logic: visit costs exploded as users booked flights purely to access lounges.
Not all cards are equally at risk of devaluation at any given time. The warning signs are consistent across every card that has eventually been cut:
The card launched with benefits that would be hard to justify on pure interchange economics: uncapped cashback, unlimited lounge visits, elite travel transfer partners, or zero-spend milestone rewards. The bank's marketing leaned heavily on those launch benefits to drive acquisition. And the card accumulated a large, vocal user base who actively optimised around the benefits (the type of user who, ironically, is the most costly to serve).
The more a card's appeal depended on a single outsized benefit, the more likely that benefit eventually gets capped, restricted, or removed. Stability tends to come from cards with lower, flatter reward structures where there is less to walk back.
Banks count on most cardholders doing nothing after a devaluation. AutoPay is set up, the card is saved in a dozen apps, and switching feels like work. That inertia is the reason aggressive launch benefits are sustainable as a strategy: the bank acquires you at a loss and recovers the margin slowly over years once the benefits are quietly cut. Knowing this is how the game works is half the defence against it.
The goal is not to find the one card that will never devalue. That card does not exist. The goal is to build a setup where no single devaluation can significantly damage your overall rewards picture.
OneCard has not been immune to this. Its bills and utilities rule is the clearest case: four of its five issuing banks stopped giving points on bills between July and August 2026, each in its own terms. Its Around You offers have also become less generous, by cardholders' accounts, though no document records the rates, so we cannot put numbers on it.
OneCard's simpler base structure (1X on most spends, 5X on the top two categories once you hit a monthly threshold) leaves less to claw back, but not nothing. Between July and August 2026, four of its issuing banks stopped giving any points on bills and utilities, and stopped counting them towards 5X (see the 5X rewards guide).
The newer app cards follow the same path. Jupiter's Edge+ made its 50% shopping rate conditional on ₹15,000 of spend in a statement cycle from 10 October 2026 (see how Edge Jewels work). super.money's superCard cut UPI cashback from up to 5% to 1% in August 2025 and raised its interest rate in June 2026 (see how superCard works). We record every such change, dated and quoted from the issuer's terms, on the card changes tracker.
There is also a separate issue worth noting: new card issuance is currently paused due to an RBI directive. If you are considering OneCard as an alternative after a devaluation on your existing card, that is not currently an option. See the full picture in our guides below.
Card Fine Print is an independent, unofficial site and is not affiliated with FPL Technologies Pvt. Ltd., SBI Card, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, or any other financial institution. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Card terms change frequently, so always verify current benefits directly with your card issuer.
Was this article helpful?
Found this useful? Share it.
Still have questions?
Tap a question for an answer straight from the issuers' documents, or ask your own.