How does the HSBC Premier card earn points?

The HSBC Premier earns 3 points for every ₹100 you put on it, on every category, with nothing excluded in its record. Hotels booked through HSBC’s Travel with Points portal earn 36 points per ₹100, which the card markets as 12X, and flights booked there earn 18 per ₹100, or 6X. Those accelerated points share one ceiling: 18,000 a month across the portal, after which portal bookings fall back to the base rate.

That is the whole earning structure. Everything else about this card is about what the points are worth and what it costs to hold.

The base rate, and why the card lists no exclusions

Most Indian rewards cards carry a list of merchant categories that earn nothing: fuel, rent, wallet loads, insurance, government payments. The Premier’s record carries none. Rent, insurance and utilities earn the same 3 points per ₹100 as a restaurant bill does. That is unusual, and it is the reason the card shows up in threads about where to route a large, boring payment.

Two things still apply. Fuel gets a 1% surcharge waiver on transactions between ₹400 and ₹4,000, which is a refund of the pump’s surcharge rather than a reward. And foreign-currency spends carry a 0.99% markup, low for an Indian card, though it is a cost, not a credit.

The 12X and 6X rates only live in one place

The accelerated rates apply to bookings made through Travel with Points, HSBC’s own travel portal. Hotel rooms there earn 36 points per ₹100 and flights earn 18. A hotel booked directly with the property, or a flight bought on the airline’s site, earns 3.

The cap is what most people miss. The record carries one shared ceiling of 18,000 accelerated points a month for the whole portal, hotels and flights together. At 36 points per ₹100, a single month with ₹50,000 of hotel bookings through the portal reaches that ceiling on its own. A bigger travel month does not earn more from the portal; the excess earns the base rate. If a trip is being paid for in one go, splitting the booking across two statement months keeps both halves inside the cap, provided the portal lets the booking be split at all.

What a point is worth depends entirely on where it goes

The Premier’s points move to 20 partner programmes. Fifteen of them convert at 1:1: Air India Maharaja Club, Flying Blue, British Airways Avios, Etihad Guest, EVA Air, JAL Mileage Bank, Singapore KrisFlyer, Qantas, Qatar Airways Avios, Thai Royal Orchid Plus and Vietnam Airlines on the airline side; Accor ALL, IHG One Rewards, Marriott Bonvoy and Wyndham Rewards among hotels. AirAsia takes points at 1:3. Turkish Miles&Smiles, United MileagePlus and Hainan convert at 2:1, and Shangri-La Circle at 5:1.

The ratio is not the value. Krediit’s catalog prices each partner point in rupees from what a redemption actually buys, and the spread is wide. Accor ALL comes out at ₹2.19 a point, because Accor points pay down a hotel bill at a fixed rate. KrisFlyer, British Airways, Qatar and JAL miles sit around ₹0.90. Marriott and IHG points, despite the same 1:1 ratio, price at ₹0.45.

So the same 18,000 points are worth roughly ₹39,420 as Accor credit, about ₹16,200 as KrisFlyer miles at that valuation, and near ₹8,100 as Marriott points. The arithmetic is the card’s whole case: a 3-point base rate with a ₹2.19 exit is a return above 6% on plain spend, and a ₹0.45 exit on the same points is under 1.5%. Which partner the points end up in matters more than which category they were earned in.

What it costs, and who can hold it

The annual fee in the Key Fact Statement is ₹20,000, and the joining fee is ₹12,000. The same statement says the annual fee is waived for qualified Premier customers, which in practice means the fee follows the banking relationship rather than card spend. The record carries no spend-based waiver because there is none.

The card is only issued to HSBC Premier customers. The salary route is a net monthly credit into an HSBC account that works out to ₹36 lakh a year; the other routes are a relationship balance or a home loan with the bank, and neither has a salary floor. Someone who does not already hold the Premier relationship cannot apply for the card on its own.

There is a welcome bonus of 20,000 points on first use, which at the Accor valuation is worth more than the joining fee, and at the Marriott valuation is worth less than half of it. Lounge access is unlimited, domestic and international, with eight international guest visits, at over 1,400 airports.

What to check on your own statement

Three things decide whether this card is paying what it looks like it pays. First, whether a travel booking went through the portal or direct; the difference is 36 points per ₹100 against 3. Second, how much of the month’s 18,000 accelerated-point allowance a booking used, since two bookings in one month can hit the ceiling and the second one earns base. Third, which partner the points are headed to, because that is where a point becomes ₹2.19 or ₹0.45.

The facts table under this guide is the card’s catalog record, dated. Krediit keeps that record against your own spend, shows the cap headroom before a booking rather than after the statement, and prices the balance at every partner so the exit is a number, not a guess.