When is the ICICI Sapphiro annual fee waived?

The ICICI Sapphiro charges an annual fee of ₹3,500 plus GST, and ICICI waives the next year’s fee when the card’s spend goes over ₹6 lakh in a year. The fees section of the card page names no other route to a zero renewal fee, so the waiver comes down to spend.

What the card costs

Two charges appear on the card page. The joining fee is ₹6,500 plus GST, billed once, and it comes with a set of brand vouchers covering Tata CLiQ, EazyDiner, Da Milano, EaseMyTrip and Tata Croma. No waiver is attached to the joining fee. The renewal fee is ₹3,500 plus GST for each year after that, a level ICICI cut it to in 2026.

The waiver applies only to the renewal fee. Spend in one year decides whether the following year’s ₹3,500 is charged. The page puts it as spend over ₹6 lakh “and get your Annual Fee waived off for the next year”. The first year’s cost is the joining fee, whatever you spend.

How much spend that is

₹6 lakh a year comes to ₹50,000 a month. The page says “over” ₹6 lakh, so a year that ends exactly on the line is the one case the wording leaves open, and a small margin above it avoids the question.

The page does not say which year it means. The milestone benefits on the same card run on the anniversary year, which starts on the date the card was issued, not in April or January. If the waiver follows the same clock, the count restarts each year on that date. The page does not confirm this, so the card’s own statement dates are a safer reference than the calendar.

What the spend earns on the way to ₹6 lakh

The base rate in the card’s record is 2 reward points per ₹100. Utility bills and insurance premiums earn 1 point per ₹100. Rent, education payments and wallet loads earn nothing.

Spend through ICICI’s iShop portal earns more: 12 points per ₹100 on flights and on vouchers, which the card labels 6X, and 24 points per ₹100 on hotels, labelled 12X. All three share one ceiling of 9,000 bonus points a month.

The milestones sit on the same path as the waiver. ₹4 lakh of spend in an anniversary year earns 4,000 points. Each further ₹1,00,000 earns another 2,000, up to 20,000 points a year. At ₹6 lakh that is 8,000 milestone points. The 20,000-point ceiling needs ₹12,00,000 of spend, twice the waiver line.

So ₹6 lakh of ordinary spend at the base rate earns 12,000 points, and the milestones add 8,000 to that, before any iShop bonus and on top of the waived renewal fee.

The caveats in the fine print

The page says “spend” and does not define which spend counts toward the ₹6 lakh. The card record lists rent, education and wallet loads as earning no points, and nothing on the page says whether those payments still count toward the waiver. A year that clears ₹6 lakh only because of a rent payment or a wallet top-up is the year to confirm with ICICI before the fee posts.

The lounge benefit has its own spend gate, and it runs on a different clock. Four domestic lounge visits a quarter open up only after ₹75,000 of spend in the preceding quarter. Meeting that gate in all four quarters takes ₹3,00,000 a year, half the waiver line. A cardholder who spends just enough to keep the lounge visits can still pay the renewal fee. The two international Priority Pass visits a year carry no spend gate.

Foreign-currency transactions carry a 3.5% markup. If part of the ₹6 lakh is spent abroad, that markup is a cost on top, and it can outweigh the fee the waiver saves.

ICICI changed this card’s fee and lounge terms in 2026, and unconditional domestic lounge access ended on 1 July 2026. Terms like these change, so treat the figures here as reported on the date at the top of 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 falls due. Add up the spend from that date across twelve statements. If you want a total that holds under the narrowest reading, leave out rent, education payments and wallet loads.

If the total is over ₹6 lakh, the renewal fee should not stay on the next statement. If it posts and is not reversed, the page’s own wording, “Spend over ₹6 lakh and get your Annual Fee waived off for the next year”, is the line to quote when you raise it with ICICI.

The milestone points are a second check on the same total. At ₹4 lakh the first 4,000 should appear, and 2,000 more after each further ₹1 lakh. If the milestone points stop short of what your own total says, ICICI is counting your spend differently from you, and the waiver may be counted the same way.

Krediit tracks each card’s anniversary year against the spend you log. It shows how far the Sapphiro sits from its ₹6 lakh line, and from the next milestone step, while there is still time before the fee posts.