Credit cards
SBI lifetime free credit cards: what SBI Card's own MITC fee table actually shows
SBI Card's own MITC fee table lists roughly ninety products. Exactly one row shows NIL annual and NIL renewal fee, and it is a charge card.
SBI Card publishes a card-wise fee table inside its Most Important Terms & Conditions, and the copy correct as on 28 July 2026 runs to roughly ninety products. Exactly one row shows NIL in both the Annual Fee column and the Renewal Fee column — SimplySAVE Merchant SBI Card — and that card is a charge card with no revolving credit facility, absent from SBI Card’s own online application page.
The five cards Indian comparison pages routinely file under “SBI lifetime free credit cards” — Unnati, Vyapaar Unnati, Krishak Unnati, Shaurya Select and OLA Money — are all NIL in the Annual Fee column and something else in the Renewal Fee column. One of them is not issued any more. And SBI Card itself does not use the phrase “lifetime free” for any product in any of the documents checked here.
What SBI Card’s fee table actually contains
The table sits inside the MITC, a 57-page PDF whose footer reads: “All information in this communication is correct as on 28th July 2026 and is subject to change at the discretion of SBICPSL”. The last page carries the version stamp “Ver: FY 27, 14”. Its columns are exactly three — “Credit Card Name | Annual Fee (Rs.) | Renewal Fee (Rs.)”. There is no joining-fee column anywhere in it.
Directly above the table SBI Card prints a qualifier that governs every row, including the NIL ones:
These fees may vary from Cardholder to Cardholder and for different card variants. These shall be as communicated to the Cardholder at the time of applying for the credit card.
The published table is therefore indicative, and the binding figure is the one disclosed to you at application. It is still the best public evidence there is, but a NIL row is not a contract.
Six rows in the whole table carry NIL or Nil in the Annual Fee column.
| MITC row | Annual Fee | Renewal Fee | What it means from year two |
|---|---|---|---|
| SimplySAVE Merchant SBI Card | NIL | NIL | The only unconditional row. Charge card, no revolving credit. |
| SBI Card Unnati | NIL | 499 (5th Year Onwards) | Flat ₹499 from year five. No spend waiver offered. |
| SBI Card Vyapaar Unnati | NIL | 499 (5th Year Onwards) | Same structure as Unnati. |
| Krishak Unnati SBI Card | NIL | 499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.30,000 or more in the preceding year) | Conditional from year two. |
| Shaurya Select SBI Card | NIL | 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.1.5 Lakh or more in the preceding year) | The largest renewal exposure of the six. |
| OLA Money SBI Card | Nil | 499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.1 Lakh or more in the preceding year) | Issuance discontinued from 8 December 2025. |
The MITC states its fees as “plus applicable taxes”, so every rupee figure above is a pre-tax one. It does not spell out how that phrase reads against a NIL row, and we have not assumed an answer.
Only these six rows are reproduced here. No second-hand copy of a ninety-row fee table can be relied on as complete, this one included, so find your own card’s row in the MITC itself rather than in anybody’s summary of it.
The only NIL/NIL card is a charge card
SimplySAVE Merchant SBI Card gets its own table in the MITC, Table (B), which states: “SimplySAVE Merchant SBI Card is a Charge card.”; “This Card does not offer Cardholder a revolving credit facility. Cardholder has to pay Total Amount Due printed on the Statement.”; and “For the purposes of SimplySAVE Merchant SBI Card only, the Total Amount Due (TAD) will be construed to be equal to the Minimum Amount Due (MAD).”
The third clause is the whole trade. On an ordinary card the statement offers a minimum to pay and lets the rest revolve at interest; here the issuer has defined the minimum as the total, so the full balance falls due every cycle. There is no part-payment option to fall back on in a bad month.
The card’s own terms booklet says, under the heading “Terms & Conditions - Fees”: “This is a no joining fees and no annual fees card.” That booklet is stamped “Ver: FY 22 06” — an FY2022 vintage — so it is corroboration of intent rather than of the July 2026 fee schedule. Where a booklet and the MITC could diverge, the MITC governs. And whether SimplySAVE Merchant is open to new applicants at all we could not establish: no page on the site describes how to apply for it.
Krishak Unnati is non-revolving too. Its own MITC table, Table (A), lists the charges that simply do not arise on it, among them “Cash Advance Fee (No Cash Limit Allocated), Forex Markup (International usage not allowed) … Finance Charges, Late Payment Charges”.
Unnati and Vyapaar Unnati: the issuer calls it an initial waiver
These two are the reason the “SBI lifetime free” search exists, and the issuer’s own wording settles them. The Unnati booklet files the benefit under the section heading “Terms & Conditions - Initial Fee Waiver” and reads: “Annual fee of Rs.499, waived off for first 4 years”. The Vyapaar Unnati booklet carries the same heading and the same line.
Note what is absent. Plenty of rows in the same table state a spend-based waiver in brackets. The two Unnati rows state none. So from the fifth anniversary the ₹499 plus applicable taxes is billed whatever you spend.
Two widely published things about Unnati are missing here on purpose. SBI Card serves two different, undated versions of the booklet and they disagree on the reward earn rate, so no reward rate for this card can be quoted safely. And the fixed-deposit requirement aggregators attach to Unnati appears nowhere on sbicard.com, in either document.
Shaurya Select: NIL now, ₹1,499 from year two
The bracketed condition on the Shaurya Select row is the whole story: ₹1,499 plus tax in any year where card spending in the preceding year fell short of ₹1.5 lakh, which is roughly ₹12,500 a month put through this card specifically. A quiet year, a switch to a different card for daily spending, or a posting where card acceptance is thin, and the fee lands.
It is a defence-segment product: its terms booklet instructs the holder to “Mention your service branch (Airforce/Army/Navy/Paramilitary) on your card”.
Do not confuse it with the plain Shaurya SBI Card, which is a different row and is not free even in the first year: ₹250 annual and ₹250 renewal, waived on annual spends of ₹50,000 or more.
A row in the fee table is not an offer
OLA Money is the proof of that. Its fee row sits in the MITC dated 28 July 2026, and SBI Card’s own customer notices page says: “W.e.f. 8th Dec’25, the issuance of OLA Money SBI Credit Card has been discontinued.” The MITC serves existing cardholders as well as prospective ones, so a discontinued card keeps its row.
The same caution runs the other way for the remaining five. None of the six appears on SBI Card’s online application page, which carries 27 distinct card links, every one of them carrying a non-zero annual fee in the MITC. That proves only that these six are not offered through the public online channel — a branch or a campaign may still issue some of them.
We could not find eligibility terms for any of these six cards anywhere on sbicard.com, beyond Shaurya Select’s defence framing. Anything you read about who qualifies for them comes from somewhere other than the issuer.
What else the MITC does and does not commit to
Joining and annual fees are not refundable. The cardholder agreement in each of the card booklets read for this page says at clause 2.5: “A Joining fee at the prevailing rate will be levied on opening of the Card Account… The Joining and Annual fee(s) are subject to change at the discretion of SBICPSL and are not refundable.” A wrong assumption about a fee is not recoverable by complaint afterwards.
A joining fee is contemplated but never scheduled. Clause 2.5 refers to a joining fee “at the prevailing rate”, yet the fee table has no joining-fee column and SBI Card publishes no per-card joining-fee schedule anywhere we could find. So the two published columns are not necessarily the whole cost of taking the card.
One thing runs in the cardholder’s favour. A card suspended for failure to complete periodic KYC updation “will not incur Annual Fee for the inactive period. The Annual Fee will be levied once the card account is activated, upon completion of periodic updation process.” The fee is deferred, not escaped. Our guide to what a credit card actually charges you covers the rest of the schedule, which is longer than the two fee columns this page is about.
Who you are actually disputing a fee with
The issuer is SBI Cards and Payment Services Limited — CIN L65999DL1998PLC093849, a company listed on both BSE and the National Stock Exchange, with State Bank of India as its holding company and promoter. State Bank of India itself is not the card issuer. Practically, a fee dispute runs against SBICPSL and its own grievance channel, not against the branch where you hold your savings account — what the SBI brand covers and what it does not sets the group structure out in full.
That distinction also marks the limit of what this page will assert. The duty to publish a Most Important Terms and Conditions document is not peculiar to SBI Card: RBI organises its Master Directions by class of regulated entity, and its listing carries parallel card Directions for commercial banks, small finance banks, regional rural banks and urban co-operative banks, each imposing the same MITC obligation on the entities it covers. SBICPSL, though, is a company in the SBI group rather than a bank — an NBFC. We could not establish which instrument in that structure binds it, and a paragraph number lifted from one of the bank Directions would not be a citation, so this page names none.
What that leaves is the document itself, which is the evidence that matters to anyone deciding whether a card is free: SBI Card publishes an MITC, dates it and version-stamps it, and every fee figure on this page came from that document.
Checking any SBI card yourself, in five minutes
Fee schedules move — SBI Card moved the spend threshold at which the BPCL card’s ₹499 annual fee is reversed from ₹50,000 to ₹1 lakh with effect from 1 May 2026, under a notice dated 29 March 2026, and the July 2026 fee table already reflects it.
- Open the Most Important Terms and Conditions landing page and the English PDF at
/sbi-card-en/assets/docs/pdf/most-important-terms-and-conditions/mitc-english.pdf. - Read the footer date and the version stamp before anything else. If it is older than the last fee notice, stop.
- Find your exact card name in the fee table and read both columns plus any bracketed condition. “5th Year Onwards” and “Waived off on annual spends of” are different products from NIL.
- Open the card’s own booklet, usually at
/sbi-card-en/assets/docs/pdf/ekit-tncs/<card-slug>-tnc.pdf— some sit elsewhere, as Shaurya Select’s does. Booklets can be several years old, so check the version stamp and let the MITC govern where the two differ. - Scan the customer notices page for a change to your card; the archive there runs back to 2020.
Take the fee from the PDFs rather than the product page: the MITC is dated and version-stamped, so you can tell how current it is.
Which SBI lifetime free credit card is worth taking
If the requirement is a card carrying no fee in either published column for as long as you hold it, SBI Card’s table supports exactly one product — a charge card, absent from the online application page, whose “no joining fees” wording comes from a booklet of FY2022 vintage. Everything else on the “SBI lifetime free” lists is a first-year-free card, and two of them turn into a flat ₹499 in year five with no way to spend your way out of it.
That is SBI’s answer, not the market’s. The same reading applied to HDFC’s own documents and to ICICI’s MITC lands somewhere different each time, and a card that is genuinely free at another issuer beats a conditional waiver at the bank you happen to hold an account with.
If what you actually need is a first card to build a repayment record, the structure matters more than the brand: read what “lifetime free” means and how to verify it before you compare anything. Your bureau record is one of the things an issuer looks at, and it is the one you can see for yourself, so check your score free first.
Whatever you decide, re-read the MITC on the day you apply — every figure here comes from the copy correct as on 28 July 2026, and SBI Card changes thresholds by notice.
Common questions
Does SBI Card offer a lifetime free credit card?
SBI Card does not use the phrase "lifetime free" for any product in its Most Important Terms & Conditions, its card booklets, its online application page or its customer notices. In the MITC fee table correct as on 28 July 2026, one row shows NIL in both the Annual Fee and the Renewal Fee columns: "SimplySAVE Merchant SBI Card | NIL | NIL". That card is a charge card with no revolving credit facility, and it does not appear on SBI Card's own online application page, so we cannot tell you whether a new applicant can obtain it.
Is SBI Card Unnati a lifetime free credit card?
No, and the issuer says so twice. The MITC fee row reads "SBI Card Unnati | NIL | 499 (5th Year Onwards)", and the card's own terms booklet puts the benefit under the heading "Terms & Conditions - Initial Fee Waiver" with the line "Annual fee of Rs.499, waived off for first 4 years". Unlike many rows in the same table, the Unnati row states no spend-based waiver at all, so from the fifth year the ₹499 plus applicable taxes is billed regardless of how much you spend.
Can I still apply for the OLA Money SBI Card?
No. SBI Card's customer notices page states: "W.e.f. 8th Dec'25, the issuance of OLA Money SBI Credit Card has been discontinued." Its fee row still appears in the MITC dated 28 July 2026 because the MITC also serves existing cardholders, not because the card is on offer. Any roundup still listing OLA Money as a first-year-free option is repeating a fee table without checking whether the product is still issued.
What does Shaurya Select cost after the first year?
The MITC row reads "Shaurya Select SBI Card | NIL | 1,499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.1.5 Lakh or more in the preceding year)". So the renewal fee is ₹1,499 plus applicable taxes unless card spending in the preceding year crossed ₹1.5 lakh, which is about ₹12,500 a month. The plain Shaurya SBI Card is a different product and is not free even in year one: ₹250 annual and ₹250 renewal, waived on annual spends of ₹50,000 or more.
Where do I check an SBI card's fee for myself?
Start at SBI Card's Most Important Terms and Conditions landing page and open the English PDF at /sbi-card-en/assets/docs/pdf/most-important-terms-and-conditions/mitc-english.pdf. Read the footer date first — the current copy says it is correct as on 28 July 2026 and carries the version stamp "Ver: FY 27, 14" — then find your exact card name in the fee table and read both the Annual Fee and Renewal Fee columns including any bracketed condition. Then open the card's own booklet under /ekit-tncs/. The dated PDFs are the reliable artefact, not the product page.
Is the Krishak Unnati SBI Card lifetime free?
No. Its MITC row reads "Krishak Unnati SBI Card | NIL | 499 (Waived off on annual spends of Rs.30,000 or more in the preceding year)". So it is free in year one, and free after that only in a year where the preceding year's spending on the card crossed ₹30,000 — roughly ₹2,500 a month. Below that the ₹499 plus applicable taxes is billed. The card is also non-revolving: its own MITC table lists cash advance, forex, finance charges and late payment charges among the fees that do not arise on it.
Sources
Rates and rules on this page were read directly from the following sources on the dates shown. Figures change — if you are about to act on one, confirm it at the source.
- Most Important Terms & Conditions (English), correct as on 28 July 2026
- Important Notices for SBI Credit Cardholders
- Apply for Credit Card Online in India
- Most Important Terms and Conditions - Personal Credit Card
- Know your SimplySAVE Merchant SBI Card (Terms & Conditions booklet, Ver: FY 22 06)
- SBI Card Unnati Terms & Conditions booklet
- Vyapaar Unnati SBI Card Terms & Conditions booklet
- Terms & Conditions Booklet - SHAURYA SELECT SBI CARD (Ver: FY 22 06)
- Notice of the 26th Annual General Meeting of SBI Cards and Payment Services Limited