Amex Platinum Travel Devaluation: The September 9 Deadline

Amex has cut the Platinum Travel card twice in six months. The first round landed on 9 March 2026, and the second takes effect on 10 September 2026. If you hold this card, there is one date that decides whether you walk away with points or with nothing, and it is not the one most people are looking at.

I have had this card since 2018. I am not closing mine yet, and by the end of this you will know whether you should close yours.

What actually changed

The card has always run on spend milestones. You hit a cumulative spend figure inside your membership year, and Amex drops a lump of bonus Membership Rewards points into your account. Those milestones have now been rewritten twice.

Read the top row and the bottom row together, because that is the whole story. Before March, spending ₹4 lakh in a membership year returned 40,000 bonus points and a ₹10,000 Taj voucher. From September, reaching the top of the card takes ₹7 lakh and returns 10,000 bonus points and a ₹20,000 Taj voucher. The Taj voucher doubled. The points did not survive.

The ₹4 lakh milestone is the one piece that has not moved since March. It was 10,000 points then and it is 10,000 points now, which matters more than it sounds, and I will come back to it.

The date that actually matters is 9 September, not 10 September

Here is the part that will catch people out. Amex is not measuring the date you swipe. It is measuring the date the transaction posts to your account.

Spend that posts on or before 9 September 2026 counts under the old milestone rules. Spend that posts on or after 10 September counts under the new ones. A purchase you make on the 8th that takes three days to settle lands on the wrong side of the line and gets treated under the new structure.

So if you are chasing the ₹1.9 lakh milestone before it disappears, you cannot spend right up to the deadline. Give yourself several days of buffer, because the posting delay is out of your hands and it varies by merchant.

This is also why the ₹1.9 lakh milestone is the only one under any time pressure. It is worth 7,500 points and it stops existing on 10 September. The ₹4 lakh milestone is not changing, so there is no rush on that one at all. You have until your membership year ends, whenever that falls.

What ₹4 lakh returns today

Run the arithmetic on a full year at ₹4 lakh of spend, assuming you get there before 10 September:

After 10 September the same ₹4 lakh returns 18,000 points, because the 7,500 disappears from the top of that stack.

One detail worth knowing, because it cuts both ways. Fuel, insurance, utilities, cash transactions and EMI conversions earn zero base points on this card. But they count in full towards the milestones. So the 17,500 milestone half of that table is safe no matter what you buy, and only the 8,000 base portion is exposed to category exclusions. If a chunk of your ₹4 lakh is insurance premiums and electricity bills, your total lands below 25,500, but you still clear the milestones.

What those points can still do

Membership Rewards points are worth talking about as flights, not as a rupee figure, because the number only means something once you move it somewhere. Amex India transfers to airline partners at 2 points to 1 mile, and to Marriott Bonvoy at 1 to 1.

At 2 to 1, a maxed-out year at ₹4 lakh gives you 12,750 airline miles. That is a short-haul one way in economy on most of these programs, or a meaningful dent in a longer redemption you are already saving towards. Before March, the same spend produced 20,000 airline miles.

If you end up a little short for a specific redemption, Amex India does sell points directly, and I have covered whether buying Amex points is worth it separately.

Two partners are worth flagging because plenty of older guides still list them. Emirates Skywards transfers from Amex India have been suspended since 28 May 2025 and are still unavailable. Etihad Guest was dropped entirely on 1 July 2026. If you were counting on either, they are not options.

That first one stings a little for me personally. Shruti and I once flew Emirates from Barcelona to Mexico City, thirteen hours on a fifth freedom route, for 20,000 Skywards miles each plus ₹6,700 in taxes, funded by exactly this card. I wrote up how that booking worked at the time. It needed 40,000 Membership Rewards points per person, which was one clean year of ₹4 lakh spending under the old milestones. Today a year at ₹4 lakh gets you 25,500 points, and the Emirates transfer route is closed from India anyway. That booking is a snapshot of what this card used to do rather than something you can repeat.

Lounge access gets a spending condition on 1 October

Separate change, separate date. From 1 October 2026, the complimentary domestic lounge visits stop being automatic. You get up to two visits per quarter, and only if you spent ₹1 lakh or more in eligible transactions during the previous calendar quarter.

There is a transition concession: for the October to December 2026 quarter, the threshold is assessed at ₹70,000 rather than ₹1 lakh.

The awkward part is that it looks backwards. A low-spend quarter removes your access for the following one, and once that quarter has started there is no way to catch up.

So should you close it?

The annual fee is ₹5,000 plus GST, and that has not changed.

Before you cut the card, open the Amex app and find two numbers. The first is your membership year end date, which is when your milestone counter resets, and it is almost never 1 January. The second is what you have spent so far in the current year. Those two numbers decide everything.

Finish the year if ₹1.9 lakh is within reach in the next few weeks. The 7,500 points are still there for spend that posts by 9 September, and you have already paid the fee for this year.

Keep it without rushing if ₹4 lakh is a normal year for you. That milestone is untouched, you have your full membership year to get there, and 10,000 points plus base earning is a reasonable return on a ₹5,000 fee.

Let it go if ₹4 lakh is nowhere near your usual spending. Below that threshold the card is earning you 1 point per ₹50 and charging ₹5,000 for the privilege, and the milestone that used to rescue lower spenders at ₹1.9 lakh is the exact one being removed. That is the group this devaluation actually targets.

If you land in that last group, closing the card does not have to mean giving up on airline miles. You can earn Mag Miles on everyday gift card purchases through the Magnify app and move them across to airline programs without holding a premium credit card at all, which is how the Air India Maharaja Club transfer works.

Whatever you decide, decide it from your own statement rather than from the panic. Check the date, check the number, then act.

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