India’s credit card outstanding balances have grown 8.3x over the past decade, rising from ₹40,000 crore in March 2016 to ₹3,10,000 crore in March 2026, as per TransUnion CIBIL’s newly released whitepaper, Beyond the Swipe 2026: How India Uses Card as a Credit Instrument.
Cardholders grew 3.6x to 5.2 crore from 1.4 crore, while active cards rose 5x to 10.7 crore from 2.1 crore in the same period.
Average outstanding balance per consumer more than doubled to INR 65,000 from INR 31,000, reflecting deeper wallet engagement even as growth has plateaued over the past two years.
Bhavesh Jain, MD & CEO, TransUnion CIBIL, noted “The market has not been growing, either in terms of balances or the number of cardholders, despite credit performance improving considerably,” attributing this to competition from personal loans and consumer durable financing.
On issuance, SBI Card led net monthly additions with 1,81,851 new cards in May 2026, edging past ICICI Bank (1,68,344) and HDFC Bank (1,42,297), even as HDFC retained the largest overall base at 2.658 crore cards, per RBI data.
Retention is emerging as the harder battle than acquisition: the share of consumers holding only credit cards, without other retail credit products, has fallen to 33% from 50% a decade ago, while those holding three-plus cards have nearly doubled to 22% from 12%.
New-to-credit additions have also slowed sharply to 8% of new cards from 26% a year earlier, signalling tighter underwriting.
Average monthly spend per card stood at INR 16,778 in May 2026, with e-commerce accounting for INR 1.26 lakh crore of the industry’s INR 2.02 lakh crore in card spends, a base into which co-branded, no-cost EMI programmes with retailers and brands such as Apple, Levi’s, and Shoppers Stop continue to drive high-ticket, deferred-payment consumption.
On credit quality, 91-179 day delinquencies eased to 1.7% in the year to March 2026 from 2% a year earlier, even as India’s card penetration, at 25% of the credit-active population, trails Hong Kong (98%), the UK (70%), and Colombia (62%).
Editor’s Note
Ten years of data compressed into a single whitepaper rarely tell a clean story, and Beyond the Swipe 2026 is no exception.
It is simultaneously a growth chronicle and a cautionary tale about a product losing share of wallet to personal loans, consumer durable EMIs, and UPI-linked credit, even as its balances scale up.
One of the key observations is how e-commerce now accounts for more than 50% of all spends on credit cards.
One cautionary note here is that hotel bookings and flight tickets are also housed under e-commerce spends, driving the average transaction value up by 2x to 5x that of shopping for grocery on quick commerce apps or apparel and accessories on portals.
Applying the KAVACCH™ framework founded by Miles2Go Consulting Services, three signals stand out for brands and issuers:
- acquisition costs are rising as new-to-credit additions shrink
- retention economics now matter more than card-in-hand counts as multi-card households multiply and
- no-cost EMI tie-ups remain the single most reliable lever for converting card ownership into high-ticket retail spend
This is a pattern Miles2Go has been tracking closely across its retail and FMCG advisory mandates.
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