When is the HSBC Live+ annual fee waived?

The HSBC Live+ charges ₹999 a year, and HSBC reverses that fee in full when the primary card and any add-on cards together spend more than ₹2,00,000 in the card’s anniversary year. The fee is billed first and credited back later, so the waiver shows up as a charge on one statement and a credit on the next.

How the waiver clock runs

The year that counts is the card’s own anniversary year, which runs from the date the card was issued rather than from April or January. At the end of that year HSBC bills the ₹999 renewal fee. If eligible spend in the year just finished crossed the line, the services guide says the fee is reversed in the next statement cycle. The Most Important Terms add that the reversal covers the fee including applicable GST, so the tax on the fee comes back with it.

Spread evenly, ₹2,00,000 comes to about ₹16,667 a month. Spend on add-on cards counts toward the same total. That matters in a household where one person’s card carries the groceries and another’s carries the utility bills. The services guide also aligns the annual fee dates of the primary and add-on cards to whichever issue date falls later in the year, so adding a card can move the date the fee lands.

The joining fee is a separate charge. It is also ₹999, HSBC bills it after the first transaction, and none of HSBC’s documents attach a spend waiver to it. The first year’s fee is paid whatever the spend, and the waiver only applies to the renewal fees that follow.

What the spend earns on the way there

Live+ pays its cashback as a statement credit. Dining, food delivery, grocery, shopping and utility merchants earn 10%, up to ₹1,200 a statement cycle across all four together. Other eligible spend earns 3 per ₹200, which is 1.5%.

The cashback earned on the way to the waiver depends on where the money goes. If all ₹2,00,000 goes through at the 1.5% rate, the year returns ₹3,000.

Filling the 10% tier every cycle takes ₹12,000 of spend a cycle, or ₹1,44,000 across twelve cycles, and earns ₹14,400. That is still ₹56,000 short of the waiver, and those ₹56,000 at 1.5% add ₹840. The ₹999 comes back the same way in both years.

The caveats in the fine print

The wording of the threshold differs between documents. The card page says spend of “more than” ₹2,00,000. The Most Important Terms and the services guide say the spend must exceed it. The Key Fact Statement says ₹2,00,000 “or more”. Three of the four say over the line, so a year that ends exactly on ₹2,00,000 is the one case the documents disagree about.

The terms say “eligible spend”, and none of the documents defines it. The card record lists what earns no cashback at all: fuel, rent, wallet loads, insurance, education and government payments, and a longer list of merchant codes. Whether those count toward the fee waiver is not stated anywhere. HSBC also treats instalment conversions made at the till as loans, and excludes them from cashback. A year that clears the line only because of rent, a wallet top-up or an instalment purchase is the year to confirm with the bank before the fee posts.

The services guide also states that no annual fee is refunded if the card is terminated. The fee posts at the end of the anniversary year and the reversal lands a cycle later. A card closed between those two statements has nothing in its terms that brings the ₹999 back.

HSBC can change any of this with 30 days’ notice, so the figures here are as of the date on this page.

What to check on your own statement

Find the month the card was issued. That month is when the anniversary year ends and the renewal fee lands. Add up the year’s spend from that date, primary and add-on together. Add-on cards get no statement of their own, so their spend already sits on the primary card’s statement and the whole year is in one set of documents. If you want a figure that holds under the narrowest reading of “eligible”, leave out anything that looks like rent, fuel, wallet loads or instalment conversions.

If that total is above ₹2,00,000, look for the ₹999 fee and its GST on one statement and a matching credit on the next. If the fee posts and no credit follows within a cycle, the terms quoted above are what to cite when you raise it with HSBC.

Returns change the arithmetic too. HSBC recovers cashback on a transaction that is later reversed, but the terms do not say how a return is netted against the waiver total. A year that sits only just over the line after a large return is one to leave a margin on.

Krediit tracks each card’s anniversary year against the spend you log, and shows how far the Live+ sits from its ₹2,00,000 line while there is still time before the fee posts.