How credit card reward caps actually work
Updated 30 September 2026
A cap is the ceiling on what an offer pays out, and it matters more than the rate. Only 28.8% of the offers in our database publish a cap at all. Where one is published, the median is Rs 500. That means a 5% offer capped at Rs 500 stops paying after Rs 10,000 of spending, and everything above that earns the card's ordinary rate.
The number that decides everything is the cap, not the rate
A 10% offer capped at Rs 250 stops paying at Rs 2,500 of spending, so on any basket above Rs 12,500 a 2% offer with no cap is worth more. People choose the card with the bigger percentage on the banner and are then surprised by the statement. Across our database the median published cap is Rs 500, the lower quartile is Rs 299 and the upper quartile is Rs 1,500. Most caps are small.
A cap is meaningless without a period
Rs 500 a month and Rs 500 a year are different offers by a factor of twelve. Of the offers we hold that publish a cap, 1,399 do not publish which period it applies to. That is the single most common gap in the published terms, and it is the reason a cautious answer sometimes has to be that the cap exists but its period is not stated.
| Period published | Offers |
|---|---|
| Per month | 677 |
| Lifetime | 448 |
| Per statement cycle | 443 |
| Per year | 130 |
| Per transaction | 123 |
| Per quarter | 66 |
| Other, each under 25 offers | 13 |
| Not published | 1,399 |
| Total offers publishing a cap | 3,299 |
Statement cycle is not the same as calendar month
443 offers cap per statement cycle. If your statement runs from the 18th, then spending on the 17th and the 19th falls in different cycles even though it is the same week. Offers that cap per calendar month behave differently again. Neither is wrong, but assuming they are the same is how a cap gets breached without noticing.
Scope is the second hidden dimension
A cap can apply per card, per transaction, per merchant or per category. Of the 3,299 live offers that publish a cap, 1,390 cap per card, 86 per transaction, 99 per merchant and 54 per category. Per merchant means a second merchant in the same offer resets your allowance. Per card means holding two cards from the same issuer gives you two allowances. Scope is not published on 1,635 of them.
| Scope published | Offers |
|---|---|
| Per card | 1,390 |
| Per merchant | 99 |
| Per transaction | 86 |
| Per category | 54 |
| Other, each under 25 offers | 35 |
| Not published | 1,635 |
| Total offers publishing a cap | 3,299 |
What to do about it
Before a large purchase, check the cap and its period rather than the headline rate, and work out the spend at which the cap is reached. Above that number, a lower uncapped rate usually wins. Where the period is not published, treat the cap as monthly, which is the most common published value and the more conservative assumption.
Figures on this page are computed from AskTula's offer database, 11,437 live offers read from published terms across 593 cards and 47 issuers, as read on 30 September 2026. They describe what issuers, merchants and card networks publish, not what any individual card will pay you.