What does the Amazon Pay ICICI card still earn on?

The Amazon Pay ICICI Bank card earns 1 point per ₹20 you spend on amazon.in while you hold an Amazon Prime membership, which works out to 5%, and 1 point per ₹100 on everything else, which is 1%. A point is worth ₹1 in the catalog, so the headline rate and the money you get back are the same number. The card has no annual fee, and neither rate has a monthly ceiling in its record.

Against that, the card carries a long list of spends that earn nothing at all, and the list got longer twice in the last two years. Rent left it in 2024. Education, utilities and international spends left in 2025.

Three rates, set by where the spend lands

Spends on amazon.in earn 5% for a Prime member and 3% without Prime. A third band pays 2%: digitally-fulfilled categories, purchases at partner merchants made through Login and Pay with Amazon Pay, and physical gift cards. Everything else, at any merchant, earns the base 1 point per ₹100.

Two things sit inside Amazon and still fall outside the 5%. Gold Coins earn nothing. Flight and hotel bookings made through Amazon Pay are carved out of the accelerated rate as well, so a holiday booked on the same site as the groceries does not pay the way the groceries do.

Put ₹15,000 a month through amazon.in as a Prime member and the card returns ₹750. The same ₹15,000 without Prime returns ₹450. Spend that ₹15,000 anywhere else at the base rate and it returns ₹150. Across a year, the Prime rate on that spend adds up to ₹9,000, five times what the base rate pays on the same money.

The categories that stopped earning

Fuel, gold, silver and any other precious metal, and every tax payment earn no reward points. Fuel still gets the 1% surcharge waiver, which refunds the pump’s surcharge rather than paying a reward, so it lands on the statement as a credit that is not a point.

Rent stopped earning on 18 June 2024. Education, international transactions and utilities paid anywhere other than Amazon all stopped on 11 October 2025. Amazon Business spends earn nothing. Physical and digital gold earn nothing. EMI transactions and EMI-on-call earn nothing.

Read together, those cuts remove most of the large recurring payments a household routes through a card. What still earns is retail spend, and mostly retail spend at one retailer.

Two rules in the fine print that cost more than they look

The first is the cart rule. One excluded item zeroes the whole order. A ₹15,000 Amazon cart that would have paid ₹750 pays nothing if a gold coin goes in beside the rest, and putting that item in its own order is the difference between ₹750 and zero. A zero looks the same as a posting delay for the first few weeks, which is why this one usually gets found late.

The second is the EMI clawback. Points already credited are taken back if the purchase behind them is later converted to EMI. That conversion often happens after the statement, sometimes on a phone call, so the reversal lands in a later cycle than the earning did. A points balance that drops with no redemption against it is usually this.

The forex line reads two ways

The foreign-currency markup is 1.99%, cut from 3.5% on 11 October 2025. That is low for an Indian card. The same date is when international transactions stopped earning reward points, so a spend abroad now costs less to make and pays back nothing. Both changes took effect together.

One documentation note, because it causes arguments. ICICI’s Amazon Pay terms PDF still prints the older 3.50% conversion factor. The product page and ICICI’s own announcement both state 1.99%, and 1.99% is what the catalog carries.

What to check on your own statement

Four things decide whether this card paid what it looks like it pays.

Check your Prime status on the date of the order, not today. The 5% and the 3% are the same card on different days, and a lapsed membership moves ₹750 to ₹450 on a ₹15,000 month with nothing else changing.

Check whether a zero-earning Amazon order had an excluded item in it. A gold coin, or one item sold through Amazon Business, takes the whole cart out. Compare the order contents against the exclusion list before treating the points as late.

Check for reversals a cycle after the spend. Those are usually EMI conversions taking back points already paid, and they will not line up with the transaction that earned them.

Check whether your utility and education bills are still credited. If you set those payments up before October 2025 and have not looked since, they are now earning nothing while continuing to run.

Krediit holds this record dated against the card, prices the points in rupees, and says which card in your wallet earns most on the spend in front of you before you pay rather than after the statement.