The ceiling

Published 29 September 2026

A cap is a devaluation that only punishes your best customers - the ones who actually use the card. That is precisely why issuers love it.

From 1 September 2024, HDFC Bank capped reward points earned on utility transactions at 2,000 per calendar month, and did the same for telecom and cable payments, ET reported when the bank emailed customers about its autumn revisions. The caps are not a leak or a rumour - they are printed in the bank's own Most Important Terms and Conditions, version 2.3 dated October 2024: "Reward Points earned on Utility transactions will be capped at 2000 Reward Points per calendar month," and the identical line for telecom. A month later, from 1 October 2024, the SmartBuy portal capped redemption of points for Apple products at one product per calendar quarter, and Tanishq vouchers at 50,000 points per quarter - both applying to the bank's flagship Infinia and Infinia Metal cards, the premium products whose entire pitch was accelerated rewards.

Read that again. The ceiling was placed not on the entry-level cards but on the most expensive ones - the cards customers pay ₹12,500 a year for - because those were the cards where the earning was real. A cap does not bother the casual user. It is engineered to find the person who did the math, optimized the portal, and actually extracted the advertised value, and to tax exactly that person.

An industry of ceilings

HDFC Bank is not the outlier; it is the norm. In the AP Labs dataset of 232 cards, 143 - 62% - carry a monthly or statement-cycle cap on what you can earn. The architecture is remarkably uniform: the headline rate survives, the ceiling lands just above the average customer's spend, and the heavy user's incremental spend earns nothing.

The caps come in dialects. Cashback cards cap in rupees: the CASHBACK SBI Card's headline "5% online" is capped at ₹2,000 per statement cycle, with offline 1% capped at another ₹2,000 - a combined maximum of ₹4,000 a month, straight from the issuer's FAQ. Points cards cap in points: 2,000 here, 5,000 there. Travel cards cap the accelerated earn: portal multipliers apply "up to" a monthly ceiling, after which spend reverts to base rate. The effect is always the same: the advertised rate is a rate for the first slice of your spending, and every rupee above the line earns at a fraction - or nothing.

The ceilings are not fine print a journalist had to dig up; they are a printed table. The same MITC's "Fair Usage Policy" fixes the maximum reward points earnable in a single statement cycle, card by card: 2,00,000 for Infinia and Infinia Metal; 75,000 for the Diners Black family; 50,000 for Regalia and its siblings; 25,000 for Regalia First; 15,000 for MoneyBack and the mass-market row. A card whose brochure promises 10X rewards carries, in the same document, a hard monthly lid. The brochure sells the multiplier; the terms sell the ceiling. Only one of them is true at scale.

The cap also has a ratchet. Once an issuer learns a category's ceiling, the next revision lowers it or adds a sibling. HDFC Bank's autumn 2024 package capped utilities and telecom at 2,000 points a month; the same bank's earlier 2023 revisions had already capped SmartBuy multipliers on its mass-market cards, as Outlook Money reported at the time; the MITC dates the grocery ceiling to 1 January 2023 - 2,000 points a month on the premium row, 1,000 on everything else. Each notice is a small adjustment. Read across three years, the ceilings form a grid.

For the cardholder, the defense is arithmetic, not outrage: know the ceiling before you plan the spend. A 5% rate capped at ₹2,000 a month is worth at most ₹24,000 a year; if your pattern earns more, the excess is a donation. The dataset behind our sibling Credit Card Maximizer exists to do exactly that arithmetic per card, because the brochure never will.