The Best Credit Cards by American Express, India

The Bottom Line

The American Express SmartEarn Credit Card is the best entry level credit card in India from American Express. This card can earn you a net reward yield of 1.3-1.9% on all your spending.

The SmartEarn offers rewards equal to 6% on Amazon, Flipkart, & Uber and 3% on using Swiggy, BookMyShow, PVR etc. However, it has relatively low monthly caps on the rewards you can earn, which reduces the net rewards yield if you spend more than ₹20,000 a month on the card.

If you spend more than ₹20,000 a month on your card, we recommend signing up for the American Express Platinum Travel Credit Card. This card can earn you a net reward yield of 0.80-1.70% on all your spending.

The Platinum Travel offers a low 0.60% reward on all you spend but earns milestone rewards of ₹4,500 and ₹7,500 when you spend ₹1.9 lacs and ₹4.0 lacs within a year. Since there are no milestone rewards for spending more than ₹4 lacs, your rewards yield falls beyond this level.

The Platinum Travel has a non-waivable fee of ₹5,000, which further reduces its reward yield.

If you have the option, consider getting your credit card from another provider like Axis Bank or SBI Card. The best cards and card combos from these providers offer much higher reward yields (2.3-3.0%) than anything from Amex India. That difference can add up to thousands of rupees in a year for you.

Table 1: All our recommendations

Table 2: Recommended Reward Redemption Options

Everything we recommend

Who this is for

If you want to get an American Express credit card this guide is for you. We recommend the best credit cards from Amex, no matter what your spending level is.

We have friends who have raised maximizing credit card rewards to an art form. However not everyone wants put so much effort tracking deals, discounts, reward caps and spending categories.

Most of us simply want a solution that is easy to manage – good enough, not perfect. If that’s you, you are in the right place.

In our guides for other credit card providers (HDFC Bank, SBI Card etc.) we have also recommended card combos that help you supercharge your rewards without a lot of micromanaging.

However, American Express offers only 6 credit cards in India and and juggling more than one of those will not meaningfully increase your rewards. So we do not recommend any card combos here.

How we picked

Banks in India offer hundreds of credit cards. Each credit card has a different set of rewards and other terms and conditions, which makes it difficult for most of us to figure out which card is best for us.

We cut through this complexity by ranking each card on its Net Reward Yield, which measures the total effective discount you receive in form of rewards, when you charge your expenses to the card.

To calculate the net reward yield of a credit card, we create 5 standardized spending profiles of a typical customer with different income levels. We then simulated the total rewards a customer with each spending profile would get on that card, based on the reward schedule for that card.

Table 3: Standardized Spending Profiles

Our reward calculations attempts to account for different types of rewards (cashback, points, miles etc.), reward caps by spending category, bonuses, fees and differences in realizable value of the rewards depending on how you redeem them (e.g. on Bank website as statement credit vs. for flight bookings).

We prefer cards with higher rewards yields, lower income thresholds and lower fees.

We apply this standardized methodology for every American Express credit card, allowing you to zoom in to the best credit cards for you.

If you’re willing to manage multiple cards, you can supercharge your total rewards compared to using a single card.

However, managing multiple credit cards requires some effort.

At a minimum, you need to:

• Sign up for the card
• Set up the monthly credit card bill payments (monthly effort or one-time depending on the banks involved)
• Review your statement periodically
• Remember to claim the reward (in some cases)
• Remember to get the annual fee waived (in many cases)

More work is also required to figure out which card to use where and possibly change the setup on various sites and apps to use a different card.

So while adding more and more cards to the mix can keep increasing the potential benefits (at least for high spenders), we think most people would want to manage another card only if the additional benefit is meaningful and the additional mental load low.

With that in mind we decided to identify sets of 2 credit cards that will work well together for most people i.e. so that you can easily remember which card to use where, meet the minimum spend & other conditions and not lose track of all the admin stuff like paying the bill and getting annual fee waived.

To find the best card combinations, we considered all card pairs for to figure out the combos that work best with each other to maximize rewards.

In testing a pair of cards, we assumed that only one card will be used for each spending category and it would be the one with the higher rewards in that category.

We think this is reasonable as you only need to know which card to use in which situation and don’t need to keep track of your spending on each card through the month.

We think most people do not want to obsessively track their spend by card and category on a daily basis. So we have tried to avoid a situation where you need to switch from one card to other based on how much you have spent on it during the month, in total or for a specific category. That’s too much work for most people.

As mentioned above, we found that combining multiple cards strategically did not give better rewards with American Express cards in India. We found that most people would do just fine by selecting our top pick in their spending category and using it for all spending.

You can read more about our credit card recommendation methodology here.

The Best card for monthly spends up to ₹20,000

The American Express SmartEarn Credit Card is the best entry level credit card in India from American Express. This card can earn you a net rewards yield of 1.3-1.9% on all your spending.

Table 4: Feature Summary – American Express SmartEarn Credit Card

The SmartEarn offers effective rewards of  6% on Amazon, Flipkart, & Uber and 3% on using Swiggy, BookMyShow, PVR, Myntra, Big Bazaar and Paytm Wallet.

All other spending with the card earns 0.60% rewards except for spending on fuel, utilities, insurance etc. However we have assumed that you can pay about half of your utility bills using the Paytm Wallet and still earn 3% on those payments.

The SmartEarn has relatively low caps on the amount you can earn with the high 6% or 3% earn rates. In a month, you can earn a maximum of ₹150 on Amazon & Flipkart and another ₹150 on Uber. The 3% earn rate on Swiggy, BookMyShow etc. is capped at only ₹75. There is no cap on rewards earned on all other spending at a rate of 0.60%.

The SmartEarn also offers a few milestone based rewards. You can receive up to 3 vouchers worth ₹500 each – on crossing annual spending of ₹1.2 lacs, ₹1.8 lacs and ₹2.4 lacs respectively.

The rewards on the SmartEarn are given in form of Amex Membership Reward (MR) Points. You can redeem these points for various types of vouchers or in payment of outstanding statement charges with a value of ₹0.30/MR points.

In our analysis, we have assumed that the points are used to pay off the statement balance. The earn rates mentioned in percentages above are based on this value of each MR point and the number of points you earn on each transaction.

The MR points have no expiry.

The SmartEarn has an annual fee of ₹495, which is waived once you spend more than ₹40,000 on the card in a year.

The Best card for monthly spends of 20,000+

If you spend more than ₹20,000 on your credit card every month, we recommend signing up for the American Express Platinum Travel Credit Card. This card can earn you a net reward yield of 0.80-1.70% on all your spending.

Table 5: Feature Summary – American Express Platinum Travel Credit Card

The sweet spot for the Platinum Travel card is if you spend around ₹4 lacs on your card in a year. That is the annual spending milestone for earning a reward of 25,000 MR Points (worth ₹7,500) and a ₹10,000 Taj Hotels voucher.

Otherwise the Platinum Travel has a very low base reward rate of 0.60% which applies to all your spending with no special category based rewards. So if you spend more than ₹4 lacs on the card in a year, then your net reward yield starts falling towards 0.60%.

Despite relatively low rewards, the Platinum Travel Card has a non-waivable annual fee of ₹5,000. Because of this the card doesn’t earn you any meaningful rewards unless you can cross ₹4 lacs spend and get the milestone reward.

The Platinum Travel is your best option for higher spends if you must have a Amex credit card. Otherwise we would recommend getting a card from another provider.

Table 6: All Amex India Credit Cards Ranked by Rewards Yield

Table 7: Key Terms for Amex Card Credit Cards