The spends that earn nothing
Updated 30 September 2026
Rewards are not paid on every rupee. The table below counts how often each of these is named in the published conditions of a live offer, most often first. A mention is not always an exclusion, but it is reliably where to read carefully.
What appears most often in the exclusion text
These counts are mentions of each term inside the conditions and caveats published against our offers. A mention is not always an exclusion, but the pattern is consistent and it points at where to read carefully.
| Mentioned in the conditions of | Offers |
|---|---|
| Insurance | 1,066 |
| Fuel | 1,001 |
| Cash and cash-like transactions | 854 |
| EMI conversions | 526 |
| Wallet loads | 492 |
| Utilities | 472 |
| Rent | 462 |
| Government payments | 415 |
| Gift cards | 383 |
| Education fees | 306 |
Rent is the expensive one
Rent is usually the largest single transaction a household puts on a card, and it is one of the most commonly excluded. Many issuers now also levy a fee on rent paid through a third party app, so the transaction can cost money rather than earn it. Check the rent position on your specific card before routing rent through it.
Wallet loads and gift cards are treated as cash
Loading a wallet or buying a gift card converts a card transaction into stored value, so issuers generally exclude it. The same logic catches some UPI top-ups. This matters because it is the route people use to try to unlock an offer, and it is precisely the route the terms rule out.
EMI is a separate world
Converting a purchase to EMI often removes the reward on it, and separately, some of the largest merchant discounts are available only on EMI. The two facts pull in opposite directions, so an EMI decision should be made on the discount and the interest, not on the rewards.
What to do about it
Before assuming a large recurring payment earns anything, read the exclusion list on your own card once. The categories above are where to look first, and they cover most of the cases where a statement does not match expectations.
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.