From 1 July 2026, Your Credit-Card Reward Points Quietly Drop to Zero on the Spends You Use Most

Short answer: From 1 July 2026, SBI Card’s PhonePe SBI SELECT (Black and Purple) credit cards stop awarding reward points on several everyday spends — education payments, toll and bridge charges, jewellery, gift cards and vouchers, insurance and utility bills paid outside the PhonePe app, and any UPI transaction done through an app other than PhonePe. The points that survive are newly capped each month — 500 on insurance and 1,500 on other PhonePe spends — replacing the old single 2,000-point cap. Similar trims were reported across other issuers on the same date. None of this takes money out of your pocket; it just switches off a reward you’d quietly come to expect.

What actually changed

On the first of the month, a lot of people pay a bill, a fee or an insurance premium on a credit card — and somewhere in the back of the mind sits the small comfort that points are piling up. From 1 July 2026, on the PhonePe SBI SELECT cards, that comfort goes to zero on exactly the spends Indians put on cards the most.

According to SBI Card’s updated terms, these categories stop earning reward points on the Black and Purple SELECT cards:

Spend	Reward points from 1 July 2026
UPI via any app other than PhonePe	Zero
Education / school & college fees	Zero
Toll and bridge payments	Zero
Jewellery	Zero
Gift cards and vouchers	Zero
Insurance & utility bills paid outside PhonePe	Zero

The points you do still earn are now boxed in. Where there was one combined cap of 2,000 points, there are now two monthly caps: 500 points on insurance and 1,500 points on other PhonePe spends.

The quiet part: it’s an app lock-in

Read the UPI line again. UPI on a credit card still earns points — but only if you route it through PhonePe. Do the same payment in any other UPI app and you earn nothing. That’s not a reward being killed; it’s a reward being used to herd you into one app. The villain here isn’t the bank and it isn’t a policy — it’s the silence around a “terms updated” email, and the gentle squeeze toward staying inside one company’s walls.

It isn’t just one card

The same direction shows up across issuers around the same date. Treat the figures below as reported by media — verify them against your own card’s terms before you act:

• HSBC — reportedly stops awarding points on government, insurance, wallet-load, fuel, tax and utility spends.
• YES Bank — free domestic airport-lounge access now reportedly needs ₹35,000 spend per quarter (up from ₹10,000).
• HDFC Regalia Gold — lounge access reportedly tied to roughly ₹60,000 per quarter.

When several banks move the same way on the same date, it’s less a coincidence than a correction. The honest reading: those generous reward rates were a subsidy — a customer-acquisition cost banks were happy to pay while UPI-on-credit and reward-stacking were land-grabs. The land is grabbed. The subsidy is being walked back.

What feels free is often a subsidy. The bill doesn’t arrive when you sign up. It arrives, quietly, in a terms update two years later.

The one genuine win

Not everything on the 1 July list is a takeaway. UIDAI has waived the ₹75 fee for Aadhaar demographic updates — name, address, date of birth, gender, mobile, email — done through the Aadhaar app, from 1 July to 31 December 2026. If there’s an error in your Aadhaar you’ve been putting off, this is a free, time-boxed window to fix it. Credit where it’s due.

What to do

This whole problem sits inside your own control — that’s the good news. Four moves:

1. Read your own card’s T&C — actually read them. Not the summary, the PDF. The category that lost points on your card may not be the one in the headline.
2. Route UPI-on-credit through the app that still pays. On the PhonePe SELECT cards, that means inside PhonePe; on other cards, check which app and category still earns before you spend.
3. Stop assuming; start checking the statement. The trap isn’t the lost point — it’s discovering it a month late. Glance at where your points actually posted this cycle.
4. Use the free Aadhaar window. If your Aadhaar needs a correction, do it before 31 December 2026 while the ₹75 fee is waived.

None of these changes make you poorer by a single rupee today. They only end a small reward you’d started to count on. The lesson is older than any card: when something is free, someone is paying for it — and the day they stop is rarely the day they announce it.