Checked 2 September 2026 against Axis Bank's Most Important Terms and Conditions and HDFC Bank's Rewards Points Program terms, both linked at the foot of this piece.
On 20 August we flagged a date without contents: Axis Bank had notified a terms revision effective 28 August 2026 but had not published what it said. That date has passed and the revised terms are now readable. This piece reports them from the document itself.
Two things are worth stating at the top, because both cut against the coverage in circulation.
The Axis foreign-transaction fees are not one number. Both the foreign currency fee and the DCC markup are tiered by card, from nil on Burgundy Private and Primus up to 3.5% on ordinary retail cards. Reporting a flat rise to 3.5% is wrong for every premium cardholder.
The "new September rule" is not new. The 2,000-points-a-month cap on HDFC utility and telecom rewards, widely republished this week as a September 2026 change, took effect on 1 September 2024. It is two years old.
What the revised Axis terms now say
These sit in the Most Important Terms and Conditions, which govern the whole retail credit card portfolio rather than any single product. One caveat on how to read this section: the MITC publishes the current position, not a changelog. We have verified every figure below against the document as it stands on 2 September 2026. Where we describe something as a change, that comparison comes from Axis Bank's own notice and from contemporaneous coverage, not from the MITC, which does not show what the previous figure was.
| Item | Position in the current MITC |
|---|---|
| Foreign currency transaction fee | 3.5% on ordinary retail cards, tiered down to nil on the premium range |
| Refunds of foreign transactions | An additional 3.5% fee applies to a customer-initiated refund |
| DCC markup | 3.5% on ordinary retail cards, on its own tiered scale |
| Late payment fee | Five slabs, from nil to ₹1,300 |
| Recurring late payment fee | Additional ₹100 when the minimum due is missed for two consecutive cycles |
| Payment apportionment | Fees and charges, then EMIs, then interest, then purchases, then cash advances |
| Rent transactions | 1% per transaction on MCC 6513 |
Two different foreign-transaction fees, both tiered
It is easy to run these together, and most coverage does. They are separate charges that can both apply to a trip abroad.
The foreign currency transaction fee is the currency conversion factor applied when a transaction settles in a currency other than rupees. The DCC markup is charged instead when a terminal abroad offers to bill you in rupees and you accept. Neither is a single number:
| Card | Foreign currency fee | DCC markup |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary Axis retail credit cards | 3.5% | 3.5% |
| IndiGo Axis Bank Premium | 2.5% | 2.5% |
| Magnus and Magnus for Burgundy | 2% | 2% |
| Olympus | 1.8% | 1.8% |
| Reserve | 1.5% | 1.5% |
| Burgundy Private | Nil | Nil |
| Primus | Waived | Nil |
The spread runs from nothing to 3.5%. The same prompt at the same terminal costs a Primus holder nothing and a Cashback cardholder ₹3,500 on a ₹1,00,000 transaction. Reporting a single figure loses that entirely.
The DCC markup is the one you can avoid for free: decline the rupee offer and let the transaction settle in local currency, and the foreign currency fee applies instead of the DCC markup rather than on top of it. Our explainer on DCC and paying in rupees abroad sets out how the prompt is worded and where it appears.
The refund clause almost nobody reported
One line deserves separating out, because we have not seen it covered anywhere. It sits in the foreign currency section — not the DCC section — so it attaches to foreign transactions generally:
A refund of such a foreign transaction initiated by the customer will also attract an additional 3.5% fee.
Read plainly, returning something you bought abroad is itself charged. The conversion factor on the purchase is not simply unwound with the purchase; a further fee attaches to the refund. If you return goods bought overseas with any regularity, this may matter more to you than the headline rate.
We have not found a worked example published by Axis Bank, and we are not going to invent one, because the interaction between the original markup and this fee is exactly the sort of thing that needs the issuer's own arithmetic. What the clause does establish is that a refund is not a clean unwind. If you are owed a large refund on an overseas purchase, ask Axis Bank in writing what the net position will be before you assume it nets to zero.
Late payment fees
| Total payment due | Fee |
|---|---|
| Up to ₹500 | Nil |
| ₹501 to ₹5,000 | ₹500 |
| ₹5,001 to ₹10,000 | ₹750 |
| ₹10,001 to ₹50,000 | ₹1,200 |
| Above ₹50,000 | ₹1,300 |
Waived on Burgundy Private and Primus. On top of the slab, missing the minimum due for two consecutive cycles adds ₹100, and that ₹100 continues every cycle until the minimum is cleared — a recurring charge rather than a one-off, which is the part that compounds on somebody already behind.
Note that the slab keys off the total payment due, not the amount you failed to pay. A ₹60,000 bill on which you pay all but ₹200 late still sits in the ₹1,300 band.
Payment apportionment
Payments are applied in this order:
- Fees and charges, including applicable taxes
- EMIs
- Interest charges
- Purchases
- Cash advances
This matters only if you pay less than the full amount. A partial payment reaches your purchase balance last, after fees, EMIs and interest have been satisfied — so the interest-bearing retail balance shrinks more slowly than the payment size suggests. We set out the general mechanism in how payment allocation order works; the Axis order above is a concrete instance of it.
The open item from 20 August, resolved
Our last piece flagged that Axis Bank's Cashback Credit Card page carried a notice of a terms update effective 28 August 2026 without publishing the terms, and said we would report the contents rather than infer them from the other notices.
Having now read the card's own terms and conditions document, the answer is that there was no card-specific revision. The Cashback card's terms carry no 28 August dateline. The changes above reached it the same way they reached every other retail Axis card: through the MITC, which sits above the individual product terms.
That is worth knowing for the general case. A notice on a product page does not always mean the product's own terms changed. Sometimes it means the umbrella document did, and the product page is flagging it in the only place a cardholder is likely to look.
The card's own structure is unchanged, and we have written it up in full in our Axis Bank Cashback Credit Card review.
The September rule that is not from September 2026
Several outlets and aggregators have run a version of this line in the last few days: HDFC Bank has capped reward points on utility and telecom transactions at 2,000 a month across all credit cards, effective 1 September.
The effective date is right. The year is not.
HDFC Bank's Rewards Points Program terms and conditions list it at item 15:
With effect from 1st Sep'24, a. Reward points on utility transactions will be capped at 2000 RPs per month b. Reward points on telecom transactions will be capped at 2000 RPs per month
That is 1 September 2024. The cap has been operating for two years. Anybody holding an HDFC rewards card has already been living under it for twenty-four billing cycles, and nothing about it changed this week.
We think the misdating is mechanical rather than deliberate: the original coverage was published in early August 2024, is undated in some republished forms, and says "effective September 1" without a year. Two years later that reads as this September.
What is genuinely recent at HDFC
From the same document, item 18, the newest dated change is 1 July 2026:
- SmartBuy brand vouchers are capped at 3,000 accelerated reward points a calendar month.
- It applies to vouchers bought through GyFTR via SmartBuy or Woohoo via SmartBuy.
- The 3,000-point limit is part of, not additional to, Infinia's unchanged 15,000-point monthly SmartBuy cap.
That last clause is the one to read twice. A cap inside a cap does not give you more headroom; it partitions headroom you already had.
For completeness, the standing caps in the same document that are often reported as new: insurance 10,000 points a month (from 1 July 2025), grocery 2,000 points a month (from 1 January 2023), rent and government transactions earning nothing (from 1 January 2023), and education paid through third-party apps such as CRED, Cheq and MobiKwik earning nothing while the same payment made directly to a school or college does earn.
Where the DCC markups now sit
Because two of the three largest private issuers moved this figure in 2026, it is worth seeing them together.
| Issuer | DCC markup | Effective |
|---|---|---|
| Axis Bank, retail cards | 3.5% | 28 August 2026 |
| ICICI Bank, Emeralde | 2% | Early 2026 |
| HDFC Bank | 1.75% | 15 May 2026 |
The gap between Axis retail and HDFC is exactly double. On the same ₹1,00,000 rupee-billed transaction abroad that is ₹3,500 against ₹1,750, before taxes.
We have taken the Axis and HDFC figures from the issuers' own documents. The ICICI figure is from its published notice of upcoming changes and we have not re-read the underlying document on this dateline, so treat it as the weaker of the three.
None of this is a reason to choose a card. It is a reason to decline the rupee prompt on all of them. Declining does not make the transaction free — your card's own foreign currency fee still applies — but it replaces the DCC markup rather than adding to it, and it also avoids the exchange rate the DCC provider chose, which is the part that never appears as a line item.
Frequently asked questions
Did my Axis Cashback card's terms change on 28 August 2026?
Not its own terms. The card's terms and conditions document carries no 28 August revision. The changes came through the Most Important Terms and Conditions, which apply across Axis Bank's retail credit cards including this one.
Is the Axis DCC markup 3.5% on every Axis card?
No. It is 3.5% on retail cards, 2.5% on IndiGo Premium, 2% on Magnus, 1.8% on Olympus, 1.5% on Reserve, and nil on Burgundy Private and Primus.
Is HDFC's 2,000-point utility cap a new September 2026 rule?
No. It took effect on 1 September 2024 and has been in force since. The coverage circulating this week is republishing a two-year-old change.
Does the Axis late payment fee depend on what I failed to pay?
No. The slab is set by the total payment due on the statement, not by the shortfall. Paying most of a large bill late still attracts the fee band for the whole bill.
How do I avoid the DCC markup entirely?
Decline the offer to be billed in rupees when a terminal or checkout abroad presents it, and let the transaction settle in the merchant's local currency. Your card's own foreign currency markup still applies, but the DCC markup does not.
