When does the HSBC Live+ card stop paying 10%?

The HSBC Live+ stops paying 10% once it has paid ₹1,200 of cashback in the 10% categories in a cycle. At 10%, that ceiling fills at ₹12,000 of spend across dining, food delivery, groceries, shopping and utility bills together. The four categories share one cap, so a big grocery month leaves less room for restaurants.

One shared ceiling over four categories

The card has two rates. Dining and food delivery, groceries, shopping and utility bills earn 10%. Most other spends earn 1.5%, which HSBC calls unlimited because that tier has no cap.

The card’s record carries a single ₹1,200 ceiling for all four categories, and HSBC’s own page puts it the same way: 10% cashback, up to ₹1,200, on all dining, food delivery, grocery, shopping and utility spends. A ₹12,000 month on groceries alone fills it. So does ₹4,000 on each of groceries, restaurants and the electricity bill.

HSBC’s page words the cap as monthly. The services guide explains cashback against the bill cycle instead: it takes a statement date of the 2nd and shows the cashback posting within 45 days of that date. Krediit’s record counts the ₹1,200 by statement cycle for that reason. If your statement lands mid-month, the cap runs from one statement date to the next, not from the 1st.

Across a year, twelve full cycles come to ₹14,400 of cashback from the 10% tier, on ₹1,44,000 of spend. That spend alone sits below the ₹2,00,000 a year that waives the ₹999 renewal fee, so the rest of the waiver has to come from spend at 1.5% or elsewhere.

A category is a merchant code, not a shop name

HSBC decides the category from the merchant category code the shop’s bank assigns. The services guide says cashback is credited solely on that code, and that HSBC’s classification is final.

The guide prints the table. Restaurants are codes 5811 to 5814. Groceries are 5411, 5422, 5441, 5451, 5462, 5499 and 5921. Utilities are 4900 and telecom 4814. Shopping is a long list of about forty codes covering department stores, clothing, electronics, sporting goods and similar retail.

So a food outlet billed under a code outside that list earns 1.5% or nothing, whatever it sells. Three shopping sites are also carved out by name: HSBC’s terms say spends on Amazon, Flipkart and Myntra earn 1.5% and are excluded from the 10% category. Since they never earn 10%, they do not use up any of the ₹1,200.

What the fine print leaves open

The documents say the 10% is capped. They do not say what rate applies to spend in those categories after the cap is full, and the services guide gives no worked example past the ceiling.

Take ₹20,000 of spend in the 10% categories in one cycle as a worked example. At 10% it would earn ₹2,000. The cap pays ₹1,200. The ₹8,000 above the ₹12,000 mark then earns either nothing, for a return of 6% on the ₹20,000, or 1.5% as ordinary spend, which adds ₹120 and brings the return to 6.6%. The terms do not settle which one HSBC applies, so the statement is the only place to find out.

Some spends earn nothing in any month. Fuel, rent and wallet loads are excluded, and the services guide lists more by code: tolls, jewellery, insurance, education and government payments, hospitals, charities, wholesale clubs, local bus transport and a long run of business-to-business codes. International spends also earn nothing since the foreign-exchange markup dropped to 1.99%.

Refunds come back off the cashback. The guide says cashback paid on a transaction that is later reversed or cancelled is recovered, either from the next statement’s cashback or as a debit to the card account. It does not say whether a refund reopens room under the cycle’s cap.

What you can check on your own statement

Start with your statement date. It decides where each cycle begins and ends, and so which purchases share a ₹1,200.

Then look at when the cashback lands. HSBC credits it within 45 days of the statement date, so the cashback for this cycle’s spend shows up on a later statement. To see how close you came to the cap, match each credit to the cycle it was earned in.

Next, check any shop you expected to pay 10%. A cashback line that works out to 1.5% on a restaurant or grocery bill points to a merchant code outside HSBC’s table.

Last, a heavy month. If your spend in the four categories went past ₹12,000 in a cycle, divide the cashback credited for that cycle by the total. A figure near 1.5% on the part above the ceiling shows the base rate applied. Nothing on that part shows it did not.

Krediit keeps this card’s record against your statement date, and each spend you log shows how much of the cycle’s ₹1,200 it used.