The Best Credit Cards in India for Dining & Food Delivery

Update (02 May 2023): RBL Bank has discontinued the Edition Program and w.e.f 15 May 2023, the RBL Bank Edition Black card will become inactive. The Edition Black was our recommended credit card for food delivery prior to this change. This post has now been updated with our new recommendations.

The Bottom Line

Food Delivery

We think the MY ZONE Credit Card from Axis Bank best credit card in India for food delivery for most people. It offers 40% savings on all your Swiggy orders, with a cap of ₹120 per order.

The MY ZONE credit card is a lifetime free credit card but offers a very low 0.4% net reward yield as a general purpose card.

If you usually place a lot of large orders for food delivery (>₹2,400 each), the CASHBACK SBI Card is the best option for you. It offers unlimited 5% cashback with a monthly cap of ₹5,000 on all your online spending (incl. on apps).

The CASHBACK SBI Card is our favourite credit card from SBI Card and is a great general purpose card with a net reward yield of 1.9 – 2.3%.

A dedicated card for online food delivery only makes sense if you order multiple times each week. Most people would be better off with the best general purpose cards recommended here.

Dining

There aren’t many credit cards offering attractive rewards for dining in India. However, if you have very high dining bills (e.g. salespeople), you can consider the AU Bank Zenith Credit Card.

The Zenith offers unlimited 5% rewards on dining transactions but has an annual fee of ₹7,999, which can be waived on crossing annual spends of ₹5 lacs.

It is also a decent general purpose credit card with a net reward yield of 1.8% if you spend more than ₹50,000 a month.

There are a number of card offering 3% rewards on dining e.g. the 6E Rewards XL Indigo cards from Kotak Mahindra Bank and HDFC Bank as well as the FabIndia SBI Card SELECT.

However, we think if your spending on dining isn’t enough to justify the annual fee on the Zenith, you may be better off with the best general purpose cards recommended here, rather than getting a dedicated card for dining.

A number of credit cards also offer discounts as high as 25% on dining with their partner restaurants all over India. The number of partner restaurants in these programs is typically in hundreds to low single digit thousands.

If your favorite restaurants are included in the list of partner restaurants, then these cards can save you a lot.

However major cities in India often have more than 10,000 restaurants each and it is unlikely that these cards will be useful in to most people in most cases. As a result, we did not consider these cards.

Everything we recommend

Who this is for

Credit card acceptance in India can be patchy as not all merchants are set up to swipe. However all major food delivery services and restaurants are likely to accept cards for payment, making dining a major use case for credit cards.

A dedicated card for food delivery or dining can make sense if you love eating out or ordering in and your monthly spend on these categories is high enough.

In that case, the cards recommended in this post will maximize your rewards without costing you a bomb in annual fees.

However, most people would be better off choosing the best credit cards in India for their monthly spending level – those are the RBL Bank Monthly Treats for entry level, the ACE Credit Card from Axis Bank for monthly spending between ₹10,000 – 1 lacs and the Magnus Credit Card, also from Axis Bank for monthly spending above ₹1 lacs a month.

That would be a more convenient way to earn higher rewards, rather than choosing a card just for food delivery or dining.

How we selected

Banks in India offer more than 400 credit cards, most of which do not offer any special rewards on food delivery or dining transactions. That means you are stuck collecting the base reward rate for your card when you charge these bills to your card.

This can be annoying for reward collectors like us, because these categories are often a large portion of the total value charged to our cards.

To find the best credit cards for online food delivery and dining, we looked through the terms and conditions of all the credit cards offered by 15 major banks in India and shortlisted 21 cards that offered at least a 3% reward on dining transactions and at least a 4% reward for online food delivery.

Table 1: Shortlisted Credit Cards for Food Delivery

Table 2: Shortlisted Credit Cards for Dining

However, each of these cards has a different annual fee and reward structure, which means picking the best isn’t as simple as picking the one with the highest promised rewards for dining & food delivery.

Most of these cards have different annual fees that must be paid if you do not charge a specific minimum amount to the card in a year. If the annual fee is not waived, the annual fee will eat into your rewards.

Many cards also have a cap on the rewards you can earn, either in total or just for dining. Some cards have other restrictions e.g. rewards only available on Android or to Airtel customers.

Finally, we also considered the level of rewards each card offered for other spending, not just for dining and food delivery. After all, if you can use a single card for everything, that saves you some hassle, which is worth something.

We preferred cards that offered the highest reward rate on food delivery & dining and had no caps on those reward. We also preferred cards that had low annual fee, and a high overall net reward yield for all other spending on the card.

We did not consider cards that earn you a lot of milestone rewards, even if using those to pay dining bills would lead to higher overall rewards for you. Those cards are compared in our post on the best cards in India.

A number of cards also offer discounts as high as 10%, 15% or even 25% with their partner restaurants. Examples include the Standard Chartered Ultimate (25% on 250 restaurants) or HDFC Bank Regalia (25% off at 2,000 restaurants and 1-1 Buffet at 200+ restaurants).

If your favorite restaurants are included in the list of partner restaurants, then these cards can save you a lot. However major cities in India often have more than 10,000 restaurants each and it is unlikely that these cards will be useful in most cases (even if they have 2,000 partner restaurants).

Therefore we did not consider these cards in this analysis.

Finally, while a number of cards advertise complimentary DineOut Passport membership, these program have likely been terminated after Swiggy acquired DineOut early last year. So we did not consider these cards in our analysis.

The Best Credit Card for Food Delivery

The MY ZONE Credit Card from Axis Bank is the best credit card for food delivery orders in India. It offers 40% savings on all your Swiggy orders, with a cap of ₹120 per order. An additional positive is that the MY ZONE has no annual fee.

The cap of ₹120 means that you don’t get any additional discount if your order value is more than ₹300. However, since the next best card (CASHBACK SBI Card) only offers a 5% discount, the MY ZONE is still the better choice as long as your orders are below ₹2,400 on average.

The ₹120 cap for MY ZONE is only on a per order basis, with no restrictions on how many orders each month can earn the discount. So as long as your individual orders values are small (even if total monthly spend with Swiggy is high), this card is your best bet.

A major drawback for the MY ZONE card is that it offers a very low 0.4% net reward yield on all other spend. You should not be using this card for any other transactions.

Since it is a lifetime free card, as long as you use Swiggy frequently, it still makes sense to get it just for food delivery.

Table 3: Feature Summary – Axis Bank MY ZONE Credit Card

The Best Credit Card for Big Ticket Food Delivery

If you routinely place food delivery orders worth more than ₹2,400, you should consider using the CASHBACK SBI Card instead.

The CASHBACK SBI Card offers 5% cashback on all online and app based spending with a monthly cashback cap of ₹5,000.

This means as long as your order size is >₹2,400, you would earn higher rewards per order with the CASHBACK rather than with the MY ZONE.

The CASHBACK is also a great general purpose credit card with a net reward yield of 1.9 – 2.3%, making it our favourite credit card from SBI Card.

Table 4: Feature Summary – CASHBACK SBI Card

The Best Credit Card for High-End Dining

There aren’t many credit cards offering attractive rewards for dining in India. However, if you have very high dining bills (e.g. salespeople), you can consider the AU Bank Zenith Credit Card.

The Zenith offers unlimited 5% rewards on dining transactions at standalone restaurants. However, it has an annual fee of ₹7,999, which can only be waived on crossing annual spends of ₹5 lacs.

It is also a decent general purpose credit card with a net reward yield of 1.8% if you spend more than ₹50,000 a month.

Therefore the Zenith can be a great option for people who spend a lot more on dining than what we assumed in our sample spending profiles and who can easily cross more than ₹5 lacs a year on their card (just on dining or all transactions).

It is worth repeating that the Zenith only offers 5% rewards on spending ONLY at standalone restaurants. If a lot of your eating out happens in hotels, you would not benefit from this card.