What are the caps on the Swiggy HDFC card's cashback?

The Swiggy HDFC card pays three rates and each one stops at its own ceiling. Swiggy app spends earn 10%, capped at ₹1,500 a billing cycle. A fixed list of online merchant categories earns 5%, capped at ₹1,500 a cycle. Everything else earns 1%, capped at ₹500. Added together, the card cannot pay more than ₹3,500 in one cycle, or ₹42,000 across 12 of them, whatever you spend.

The cashback is credited against the outstanding balance, so a rupee of it is a rupee off the bill, and the annual fee is ₹500.

What fills each ceiling

The ceilings are set in cashback, not in spend, so the spend that reaches each one differs by rate. ₹15,000 of Swiggy app spend in a cycle takes the first ₹1,500 at 10%, and the rest of that cycle’s Swiggy orders add nothing from that tier. The 5% tier needs ₹30,000 at the listed categories to reach its ₹1,500. The 1% tier needs ₹50,000 of ordinary spend to reach ₹500.

Filling all three in the same cycle means ₹95,000 of spend, split in roughly that shape. The Swiggy ceiling is the one that binds first for most spending patterns, because it sits at ₹15,000 of food delivery and Instamart while the 1% ceiling waits for ₹50,000 of everything else.

The three ceilings are separate, which cuts both ways. Overshooting Swiggy does not eat into the 5% allowance, and the 5% tier keeps paying after Swiggy has stopped. An unused ceiling also rolls nowhere. A cycle with no online shopping leaves that ₹1,500 unclaimed, and the next cycle starts at zero again.

The 5% tier runs on merchant codes

The 5% rate is the part that behaves least like its label. It applies by merchant category code, and the card’s record carries the exact list: apparel, department stores, electronics, entertainment, home decor, pharmacies, personal care, local cabs, pet stores and discount stores. Grocery at code 5411 earns 5% at Amazon and Flipkart only, and nowhere else.

A merchant outside those codes earns 1%, however online the purchase felt. The code belongs to the merchant’s acquirer rather than to what you bought, so two shops selling the same goods can settle under different codes and pay different rates on the same order.

Two floors also apply. A transaction under ₹100 earns nothing on the 1% tier, and one under ₹249 earns nothing on the 5% tier. Small orders are the common case where a statement shows less than the rate suggests.

What earns nothing at all

Fuel, rent, jewellery, government payments, gift cards, wallet loads and every kind of EMI earn no cashback on this card. Neither do Smartpay, anything bought through the SmartBuy portal, cash advances, travellers’ cheques or foreign-currency purchases. Foreign spends also carry a 3.5% markup, which is a cost on top of earning nothing.

Swiggy itself has carve-outs. Anything paid for with the Swiggy Money Wallet is excluded, as are Swiggy Liquor and Swiggy Minis. Groceries and gift cards bought at a merchant that otherwise pays 5% earn nothing rather than 1%.

A cycle, priced

Take a cycle with ₹8,000 on the Swiggy app, ₹12,000 at the listed online categories and ₹25,000 on everything else. Those are assumptions chosen to show the arithmetic, not card terms.

The Swiggy spend returns ₹800, under the ₹1,500 ceiling. The listed online spend returns ₹600, also under its ceiling. The rest returns ₹250, under ₹500. The cycle pays ₹1,650 and none of the three ceilings binds. Repeated for a year that is ₹19,800 against the ₹500 annual fee, and the renewal fee is waived at ₹2,00,000 of annual spend, which that pattern clears.

Move the ₹25,000 to fuel or rent and the ₹250 disappears, because those categories earn nothing rather than 1%.

What to check on your own statement

The rate on the page and the number on the bill come apart in three places.

The first is the cashback line per cycle. If it reads ₹1,500 on the Swiggy tier, the ceiling bound and further Swiggy orders that cycle added nothing from that tier. Timing an order into the next cycle then does more than the order size does.

The second is the rate each online merchant actually paid. Compare a 5% expectation against what posted. A merchant that pays 1% is filed under a code outside the list, and that will hold for every future order there.

The third is the transactions that posted nothing. Check them against the ₹100 and ₹249 floors first, then against the excluded categories. A rent payment or a wallet load earns nothing at any size.

The card’s record here is dated, with the caps, the code list and the exclusions as HDFC publishes them. Krediit tracks the same record against your own spend, so the app shows how much of each cycle’s ₹1,500 is left before you order rather than after the statement arrives.