The Best Credit Cards by SBI Card

Update 12 Apr 2023: SBI Card has announced revised terms for the CASHBACK SBI Card. The monthly cashback cap on online & offline spending has been reduced to ₹5,000, domestic lounge benefit has been eliminated and a number of categories of spending, including Railway tickets have been excluded from earning cashback. This post has been updated with the revised terms. The CASHBACK remains our top pick for most SBI Card customers. The announced changes only impact people spending more than ₹1 lacs online or more than about ₹2 lacs in total each month. Everyone will see a slight reduction in net reward yields due to the exclusion of certain categories.

The Bottom Line

The CASHBACK SBI Card is the best credit card for most SBI Card customers. We estimate it offers an average net reward yield of 1.9-2.3% on all your spend.

The CASHBACK offers 5% cashback on all online spend and 1% cashback on everything else. You can earn as much as ₹5,000 each month in cashback.

All cashback is automatically credited to your account every month. This means you do not have to deal with the hassle of redeeming / converting vouchers or reward points.

The CASHBACK also works as a great entry level card because the first year fee is waived. If you can’t get the fee waived in the second year and spend less than ₹10,000 a month on the card, cancel the card.

Consider the SBI Card Unnati in that case. If you spend more than ₹10,000 a month, its worth paying the annual fee of ₹999 on the CASHBACK.

If you are comfortable managing multiple credit cards, we still recommend the CASHBACK as your primary credit card. Combine it with the SBI Card Prime Advantage for Dining, Entertainment & Utility bills to boost your reward yield to 2.7%.

We recommend the combo only if your monthly spend exceeds ₹50,000, so that you can be sure of getting better rewards.

Table 1: All Our Recommendations

Table 2: Recommended Reward Redemption Options

Everything we recommend

Who this is for

If you are considering signing up for a credit card with SBI Card, this guide is for you.

Whether you want to get a single credit card or to split your spends across multiple cards to optimize rewards, we have you covered.

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, this post recommends a few credit cards that can work well together and will supercharge your rewards without a lot of micromanaging.

How we picked

State Bank offers more than 70 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 created 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.

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 applied this standardized methodology to every State Bank credit card, allowing you to zoom in to the best credit cards for you.

If you’re willing to manage multiple credit cards strategically, 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 statements 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 100’s of card pairs 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.

For example, if you get CASHBACK SBI Card and SBI Card Prime Advantage, you only use the Prime Advantage for Dining, Movie Tickets & Utilities and the CASHBACK for everything else.

Table 3: Two Card Strategy for monthly spend of ₹50,000+

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.

Our recommended pairs maximize the rewards while increasing your probability of meeting the annual fee waiver spending limits and any other requirements for each card.

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

The Best Credit Card from SBI Card

The CASHBACK SBI Card is the best credit card from SBI Card for nearly everyone. We estimate most people will get a net reward yield of 1.9-2.3% using this card for all their spend. No other card from SBI Card comes close.

The CASHBACK offers 5% cashback on most online spending and 1% on all offline spending with monthly cashback cap of ₹5,000.

The CASHBACK SBI Card is, as the name says, a cashback card. This means you don’t need to worry about redeeming gifts vouchers, converting points or having the rewards expire. The reward is automatically credited into your account and offset against bills due.

It carries an annual fee of ₹999, which is waived for the first year and which can be waived again if you spend more than ₹2 lacs in a year on the card.

Table 4: Feature Summary – Cashback SBI Card

However, we think the CASHBACK is a great option as long as you spend more than about ₹90,000 a year or ₹7,500 a month on your card. At that level of spend, the CASHBACK leaves you better off than any other card from SBI Card even after paying the annual fee.

For e.g. we estimate the SBI Card Unnati offers a 0.25% reward yield and is the only card with no annual fee. Spending ₹90,000 on this card in a year earns you about ₹720 in rewards over the year, including a milestone reward of ₹500.

The same spend will earn you ₹1,800 in rewards using the CASHBACK. After deducting the ₹999 annual fee, you are left with ₹801, still more than what you got with the Unnati.

Another option here may be the SimplyCLICK Advantage SBI Card, with an annual fee of ₹499 but a higher reward yield of 0.95%. A spend of ₹90,000 in a year with this card will earn you ₹855 in rewards, leaving only ₹356 after paying the annual fee. For the SimplyCLICK, the annual fee is waived only if you spend more than ₹1 lacs in a year.

If you expect to spend less than ₹90,000 in a year, you should still get the CASHBACK for the first year when the fee is waived. You can cancel and switch to another card if you cannot get the fee waived in the second year.

We would suggest switching to the Unnati in that case due to its zero fee.

Table 5: Feature Summary – SBI Card Unnati

SBI Card offers a number of co-branded credit cards that can offer higher net reward yield than the CASHBACK SBI Card for high spenders. These were not our picks because either these are not available to all customers or would not be useful for everyone.

For instance, if you spend more than ₹50,000 a month on your card, both the Etihad Guest Premier SBI Card and the Allahabad Bank SBI Card ELITE offer higher net reward yields than the CASHBACK – .

However, The Etihad Guest Premier is only useful if you are a regular Etihad customer and comfortable redeeming all your reward points for Etihad flights.

The Allahabad Bank ELITE is likely only available to Allahabad Bank customers.

The Best Card Combo for Monthly Spends of ₹50,000+

If you spend more than ₹50,000 a month on your credit card, we recommend combining the CASHBACK SBI Card with SBI Card Prime Advantage.

Table 6: Feature Summary – SBI Card Prime Advantage

By using the Prime Advantage for Dining, Entertainment and Utility bill payments, categories on which the CASHBACK does not offer any special rewards, you can boost your rewards yield to 2.7%.

Table 7: Recommended Cards for Spends of ₹50,000+

If you do go for this combo, we suggest setting up the CASHBACK on all your online accounts and apps like Amazon, Flipkart, Big Basket, Uber, OLA, Netflix etc.

Fix the Prime Advantage as your card in your Utility bill payment apps / sites i.e. for mobile, electricity etc.

Once you do this, you only need to remember to pull out the Prime Advantage when dining in restaurants and buying movie tickets.

Use the CASHBACK everywhere else. Depending on your spending habits, you may not hit the minimum spend cut-off on the Prime Advantage and you may need to pay an annual fee of ₹2,999.

For instance in our spending profile for ₹50,000 a month, dining, entertainment and utility bills only add up to about ₹1.23 lacs over the year. However, you should still come out ahead with the combo as the additional rewards earned with the Prime Advantage will be more than the fee.

Spending ₹1.23 lacs on dining, entertainment and utility bills will earn nearly ₹4,500 in rewards with this card, comfortably more than the ₹2,999 fee. The remaining ₹1,501 is still more than what you would earn using the CASHBACK for those categories (about ₹1,200).

If you don’t want to risk compromising the total rewards, we recommend the combo only if you are confident of meeting with ₹3 lacs annual spend requirement on the Prime Advantage.

Table 8: All SBI Card Credit Cards Ranked by Rewards Yield

Table 9: Key Terms for SBI Card Credit Cards