Why We Read the MITC and the Card T&C, Never the Product Page

Published 2026-09-05

SwipeSage verifies every reward rate, fee and exclusion from two issuer documents, the Most Important Terms and Conditions (MITC) and the card’s own Terms and Conditions, never from the product page. The MITC states what a card costs; the card’s Terms and Conditions state what it actually pays, including every spend and redemption route it pays nothing on.

Two documents answer two different questions

A credit card’s product page answers one question: why you should apply. It is marketing copy, written to sell the card, and it is never a source for what the card costs or pays.

Two other documents answer those questions, and we read both before writing anything about a card.

The MITC, short for Most Important Terms and Conditions, states what a card costs: the annual fee, the spend required to waive it, interest rates, cash advance charges and limits.

The card’s own Terms and Conditions document states what a card pays: the base reward rate, what that rate is actually worth once you redeem it, the caps on how many points you can earn, and the list of spends that earn nothing at all.

Neither document is the one most people read. The product page is designed to be read; the terms documents are designed to be filed.

The figures

Where a carve-out hides

A carve-out is a condition on a rate that the headline number doesn’t carry. It’s not usually a lie. The number is correct; it’s the condition attached to it that goes missing when the number gets repeated. The HDFC Regalia Gold shows both ways this happens on the same card.

The best route read as the only route

The redemption table names five separate routes, each worth a different amount per point, and the best of them, redeeming for select premium brands in the Gold Catalogue, pays Rs 0.65. The route most cardholders actually use by default, cashback against the statement, pays Rs 0.15: 4.3 times less.

A card’s real return, at 5 Reward Points per Rs 200 of eligible spend, depends entirely on which of those two routes applies to you:

Gold Catalogue, select brands (best route)    2.5 x Rs 0.65  =  1.63% back
Statement credit (default)                    2.5 x Rs 0.15  =  0.38% back

Quote a single “Rs 0.65 per point” figure without saying which route earns it, and a reader gets a card that returns 1.63% back. In practice, that figure is reachable only by redeeming against a defined catalogue of premium brands, not as a general-purpose rate; anyone who doesn’t specifically shop that catalogue gets Rs 0.15, the statement-credit default, worth 0.38% back. The worst rate is the one you get by default, and both which route a figure belongs to, and what that route actually lets you buy, are exactly the detail that gets dropped when a number is repeated on a comparison page.

The exclusion nobody advertises

The second carve-out is simpler and easier to check: entire categories of spend earn no reward points at all, and none of them appear on the product page. The card’s own Rewards Points Program Terms and Conditions states it directly:

“Reward points will not be accrued for rental pay transactions, property management services like rent, maintenance, packers &movers, etc and government transactions”

Fuel and e-wallet loading are excluded elsewhere in the same document. Someone whose largest monthly outgoings are rent and fuel earns nothing on the bulk of their spending, no matter how large that spending is, and the 5 Reward Points per Rs 200 headline rate never told them so.

Why this determines the whole verification approach

Both carve-outs above are true statements sitting one document below the number everyone quotes. Neither is visible from the product page, and neither is visible from a comparison site that lists “5X rewards” without opening the terms behind it. That is the entire reason SwipeSage reads the MITC and the card T&C directly, and re-reads them on a schedule rather than once: a card’s advertised rate is a fact about what the issuer wants to talk about, and the terms document is a fact about everything else.

Sources: HDFC’s “Regalia Gold Product Feature Change” (effective 15 May 2026), “Rewards Points Program Terms and Condition” for the Regalia Gold Credit Card, “Reward points redemption through SmartBuy”, and HDFC’s “MITC in English” (Personal MITC, all cards). First read 4 September 2026, independently re-fetched and re-read 5 September 2026 for this post, all four documents came back byte-identical to the 4 September reading. Card terms change, so confirm current terms with HDFC before applying. SwipeSage earns no commission on any card, including this one. How we rank cards.