The Best Credit Cards in India by Citibank

The Bottom Line

The Citi Cash Back Credit Card is the best credit card from Citibank India, if you spend less than ₹50,000 on your card each month. You can earn a net reward yield of 0.85-1.20% on all your spend with this card.

The Cash Back Card gives 5% cashback on movies, telecom and utility bill payments. All other spend earns 0.5% cashback. It carries a non-waiveable annual fee of ₹500.

Go for the Citi PremierMiles Credit Card if you spend more than ₹50,000 a month on the card. The PremierMiles gives you a net reward yield of 1.5-1.9% on your total spending.

It offers an effective reward of 4.5% for airline bookings & on PremierMiles website and 1.8% for all other spending with no maximum cap. The reward points can be redeemed on vouchers and airline miles. The PremierMiles Card has a non-waiveable annual fee of ₹3,000.

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 Citibank. This difference can add up to thousands of rupees in a year.

Table 1: All our recommendations

Table 2: Recommended Reward Redemption Options

Everything we recommend

Who this is for

If you are a Citibank customer and you want to get a credit card this guide is for you. We recommend the best credit cards, 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, Citibank only offers 8 credit cards in India and juggling more than one of those will not meaningfully increase your rewards.

So we do not recommend any card combos for Citibank customers.

How we picked

Banks and credit card companies 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 Citibank 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 100’s of 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 Citibank’s cards. 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 Credit Card for Monthly Spends up to  ₹50,000

The Citi Cash Back Credit Card is the best entry level credit card from Citibank India. It has a non-waiveable annual fee of ₹500 and gives you a net reward yield of about 0.8-1.2% on all your spend.

Table 4: Feature Summary – Citi Cash Back Credit Card

The Cash Back Card gives 5% cashback on movie tickets, telephone and utility bill payments. All other spending earns 0.5% cashback.

There is a monthly cap of ₹100 for cashback earned on movie tickets, telephone and utility bill payments. There is no cap on cashback earned on other spending.

The Citi Cash Back 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.

The cashback is credited in your account in multiples of ₹500 only. However the unredeemed rewards never expires and are carried over till you reach the minimum redemption amount.

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

If you spend more than ₹50,000 a month on your card, get the Citi PremierMiles Credit Card by Citibank. We estimate that you earn a net reward yield of 1.5-1.9% on all your spending with this card.

Table 5: Citi PremierMiles Credit Card

The PremierMiles Card offers 4.50% rewards for airline and other bookings on PremierMiles website. All other spends earn 1.80% with no caps.

The rewards are in the form of PremierMiles reward points which can be redeemed for vouchers with partners like IndiGo, MakeMyTrip, GoIbibo and Yatra.

Vouchers for travel partners like IndiGo and MakeMyTrip are redeemed at ₹0.45 / PremierMile while all other vouchers can be redeemed at ₹0.30/ PremierMile. In our calculations, we have assumed that you redeem the points at a value of ₹0.45 / point.

The PremierMiles Card has a non-waiveable annual fee of ₹3,000, which has already been deducted in our calculation of the net rewards yield.

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

Table 7: Key Terms for Citibank India Credit Cards