The exclusion list

Published 29 September 2026

First they came for the fuel spend. Then the rent. Then the school fees paid through the wrong app. The exclusion list is where rewards go to die - one everyday category at a time.

The pattern is easiest to see in sequence. In July 2023, Axis Bank's Magnus rewrite excluded utility services and government-institution payments from reward eligibility, per Mint. From 1 April 2024, SBI Card stopped giving reward points on rent payments across a long list of its cards, CNBC-TV18 reported. From 15 July 2024, twenty-two SBI cards stopped earning on government transactions, per ET. From 1 September 2024, HDFC Bank stopped awarding points on education payments made through third-party apps - CRED, Cheq, MobiKwik and the like - while keeping direct payments to schools and colleges eligible, per ET. The bank's own Most Important Terms and Conditions (v2.3, October 2024) says it without the press release's manners: "Education payments made through third-party apps like (but not limited to) CRED, Cheq, MobiKwik, etc. will not earn Reward Points on all other cards" - and, in the same list, rent earns no points on any HDFC card at all, and government transactions earn none on most.

Notice what these categories have in common. They are the large, recurring, unavoidable spends - the ones a household cannot reroute. Rent is the single biggest monthly outflow for urban cardholders. Fuel is weekly. Utilities and school fees are fixed costs of family life. An exclusion list that exempts luxury shopping and travel while stripping rent and fuel is not managing "abuse". It is excising the spends where your rewards would have been largest, and keeping the ones where the issuer's interchange is fattest.

Excluded from earning, excluded from counting

ICICI Bank's own MITC adds the next turn of the screw, effective 15 November 2024: "The spend threshold for annual fee reversal and milestone benefits will exclude rent, government, and education payments." Read what that does. The fee-waiver target - spend the required lakh or two and the annual fee comes back - is the one promise a heavy rent-payer could still reach. Now the largest household spends earn no points AND do not count toward the target. The exclusion list no longer decides only what earns; it decides what exists at all. A year of rent is, to the waiver arithmetic, zero.

And rent gets a third treatment in the same document: a 1% fee on every rent payment on any merchant, routed through merchant code 6513 - which, the same clause repeats, earns no reward points on any ICICI card. The full sequence for the biggest spend of the month: it earns nothing, it counts toward nothing, and it costs 1% for the privilege. The points themselves are on a timer too - they expire 36 months from issuance, and on cancellation they lapse "and cannot be reinstated." Excluded from earning, excluded from counting, charged for existing, deleted on schedule.

The list, measured

How widespread is this? Across the 232 cards in the AP Labs dataset, 183 - 79% - carry exclusion language in their current fine print. The categories, counted across those documents:

The issuers' stated rationale is consistent: these categories were being "gamed". Rent-through-card services let tenants manufacture spend; wallet loading let users convert credit to cash-like balances; fuel and utilities carry thin interchange. All true. It is also true that the industry's answer was not to price the misuse but to zero the category - for everyone, including the customer who simply pays their actual rent and their actual electricity bill.

And the list only grows. Each revision cycle adds categories; none removes them. In the three years this file covers we found not one instance of a major issuer restoring an excluded category. The ratchet turns one way.

The practical consequence lands on the most ordinary use case. A family that puts ₹25,000 rent, ₹8,000 fuel and ₹6,000 utilities on a 1% card in 2023 earned about ₹4,700 a year on those spends. By 2026, on the typical card in this dataset, those exact spends earn zero - while the marketing page still leads with the same 1%.