The default card for anything bought online, which is most of what people buy.
A flat 4 mpd on online spend with almost no category argument, plus the two best workarounds of any card here.
| Min income | Base earn | Bonus earn | Monthly cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| S$30,000S$42,000 for foreigners | 0.4 mpdeverything else | 4 mpdonline, travel excluded | S$1,000about 9,000 bonus points |
| Annual fee | Transfer fee | Points expiry | Transfer blocks |
| S$196.20first year waived | S$27.25per transfer, not per year | 60 monthsfrom card approval | 10,000 miles25,000 points minimum |
This card pays in Citi ThankYou points rather than cashback, and 2.5 of them buy 1 airline mile. "4 mpd" means every S$1 spent online earns 4 miles, and roughly 5,000 miles is a one-way short-haul economy seat before taxes.
TLDR
4 mpd on essentially anything bought online, capped at S$1,000 of spend a month. No online-or-contactless rule, no MCC lottery on the everyday stuff: if the transaction is online and it is not travel, it earns.
Two catches. Travel is excluded outright, which stings on a card people reach for when booking flights, and transfers cost S$27.25 every time. That fee is small in isolation and annoying on a card capped at S$1,000 of bonus spend a month, because it lands on every conversion you make.
Get it if
- Most of your discretionary spend happens online
- You buy groceries online, which most miles cards refuse to pay on
- You want the widest set of legitimate workarounds available
Look elsewhere if
- You want a free card and will not call for the fee waiver
- You book a lot of travel and want it to earn on the same card
- You transfer points little and often, where S$27.25 a time adds up
What does it cost to hold?
S$196.20 a year, waived for the first year, and usually waived after that if you call and ask.
| Card | First year | Second year on |
|---|---|---|
| Principal card | Waived | S$196.20 |
| Supplementary card | Waived | S$98.10 |
The fee is negotiable, the transfer fee is not. A yearly phone call usually removes the S$196.20. Nothing removes the S$27.25 per conversion, and that is the charge to plan around: it makes this a card you sweep in large blocks rather than trickle.
What do I get for signing up?
There is a welcome offer, and the channel you apply through changes what you get for the same application.
This is the cheapest mistake to avoid on the whole page. The bank’s own page is the obvious place to click and it is almost never the best-paying one. Same card, same approval, same credit check, different reward.
Citi Rewards
Requires S$500 of spend within 30 days of card approval.
Sign-up rewards might change, so confirm the current offer before you apply. New customers only, meaning no card from Citibank in about the last 12 months.
Sign-up offers move monthly and almost always carry a "new to bank" condition, meaning no Citi card in the past 12 months. Closing a card to re-qualify usually costs more than the bonus is worth. Check the minimum spend and the window before you apply, not after.
How many miles do I earn?
4 miles per dollar on online spend, up to S$1,000 a month. Everything else earns 0.4.
Citi writes this as 10X ThankYou points, and 2.5 points buy 1 mile, so 10X is 4 mpd. The 10X is what goes on the marketing. 4 mpd is what lands in your account.
| Spend type | Points | Miles per dollar | Cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Online, excluding travel | 10X | 4.0 | S$1,000 / month |
| Everything else | 1X | 0.4 | Uncapped |
The simplicity is the selling point. Most 4 mpd cards in Singapore make you satisfy a category and a payment method at once, so a restaurant that would have paid 4 mpd pays 0.4 because you inserted the card instead of tapping. This one asks a single question: was it online?
What spend actually counts for the bonus?
Almost anything bought online, with travel as the one large and deliberate exception.
The exclusion that matters is travel. Airlines, hotels, cruises and travel agencies all earn the base rate, which is a strange gap on a rewards card, and the reason the workaround section below exists at all.
| What you’re buying | Bonus? | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| 🛒 Online groceries | ✓ Yes | RedMart and FairPrice online count. The same basket in store does not |
| 🛍 Shopee, Lazada, Amazon | ✓ Yes | Straightforwardly online |
| 🍜 Food delivery | ✓ Yes | Ordered in an app, so it always qualifies |
| 🚕 Grab, TADA, Ryde | ✓ Yes | Charged in app |
| 📺 Streaming and subscriptions | ~ Maybe | MCC dependent; digital goods sometimes code outside the bonus |
| ✈ Flights and hotels booked direct | ✕ No | Travel is excluded from the 10X |
| 🧳 Anything through an OTA | ✕ No | Also travel, also excluded |
| 🏪 In-store retail | ✕ No | Citi’s in-store bonus is a separate, narrower thing |
Groceries are the quiet win. Supermarkets are excluded from the bonus on most Singapore miles cards, including the HSBC Revolution. Here a S$600 monthly shop bought online earns 2,400 miles instead of 240. That single habit change is worth more than most of the optimisation people spend evenings on.
What earns nothing at all?
Utilities, insurance and education are excluded outright, whatever you do.
Worth separating from the table above, because it is a different kind of no. That list decides which categories get the bonus. This one is spend Citi does not pay anything on.
| Excluded | Points earned | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 💡 Utilities and telco bills | Zero | Includes recurring card billing |
| 🛡 Insurance premiums | Zero | Nearly every SG miles card does this |
| 🎓 School and course fees | Zero | Education MCCs excluded outright |
Can you work around the gaps?
Yes, and this is the card where it genuinely pays. Two routes, both with real numbers behind them.
Every exclusion list creates a small industry of people routing around it, and most of those routes are cope. Two of them work here, and the travel one is unusually clean because the gap it closes is so large.
The travel gap: pay through Atome
A travel booking normally codes as travel and earns 0.4 mpd here. Paid through Atome’s three-instalment option, the charge reaches your card as Atome rather than as the travel agent, which codes MCC 5999 and is not on Citi’s exclusion list. The instalments also land across three months, so one big booking stops eating a single month’s cap.
| Route | How it codes | Miles on S$3,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Booked and paid directly | Travel, outside the bonus | 1,200 |
| Same booking via Atome, 3 instalments | MCC 5999, across three months | ~12,000 |
New to Atome? Signing up through my link gets you S$10 off your first purchase, claimable from their voucher centre. Bills split into three, 0 percent interest.
Atome is a credit product with late fees and account suspension, not a miles trick. It only makes sense if you were paying in full anyway and are simply routing the payment differently. Banks also close these doors without notice: the same move already stopped working on UOB cards, and Citi could add Atome to its exclusion list tomorrow without announcing it.
The overseas gap: Amaze still links here
Citi Mastercards are the only cards in this series that still link to Amaze. Every DBS, POSB and UOB card was blocked years ago. Routed through Amaze, overseas spend reaches the card as a local online transaction, which is exactly what the 10X bucket wants.
| Route | Roughly what it costs | Miles |
|---|---|---|
| Direct on a 4 mpd FCY card | about S$32.50 in FCY fees | 4,000 |
| Via Amaze on this card | about S$20 in embedded FX | 4,000 |
The version of this that died. Amaze plus Citi Rewards used to be pitched as 4 mpd on everything in SGD. Instarem added a 1 percent fee on all SGD transactions in February 2025, so paying 1 percent to earn 4 mpd is now a bad trade on local spend. The play survives only where you were going to pay an FX fee anyway.
Where does the cap actually bite?
At S$1,000 of online spend, which for most people arrives before the month does.
Worked through on S$1,500 of online spend in one month:
| Spend | Rate | Miles |
|---|---|---|
| First S$1,000 | 4.0 mpd | 4,000 |
| Next S$500 | 0.4 mpd | 200 |
| Total | 2.8 mpd effective | 4,200 |
Move that S$500 to a second 4 mpd card and it pays 2,000 instead of 200. On a card this easy to max out, the second card matters more than any tweak to how you use this one.
How do I turn points into miles?
25,000 points to 10,000 miles across the board, and S$27.25 every time you convert.
No KrisFlyer penalty here, which is a genuine advantage over HSBC: the ratio is the same wherever the points go. The cost is the transfer fee, and it is per conversion rather than per year, so the discipline is to move points in one large block rather than whenever you remember.
| Programme | Points for 10,000 miles |
|---|---|
 Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer | 25,000 |
 Cathay Asia Miles | 25,000 |
Points last 60 months from card approval, which is unusually generous and takes the urgency out of small balances. The practical minimum before you can move anything is 25,000 points, which is roughly six months of a maxed cap.
What should I pair it with?
Something that covers in-store spend and travel, because this card pays base on both.
The gaps here are specific and countable, which makes pairing a matter of arithmetic rather than taste.
| The gap | What it costs you | What closes it |
|---|---|---|
| Spend past the S$1,000 cap | 0.4 mpd instead of 4 | Any uncapped general-spend card |
| Anything bought in person | 0.4 mpd on a lot of daily life | A contactless-bonus card |
| Travel booked anywhere | 0.4 mpd on your largest purchases | A card that earns on travel, or the Atome route above |
| Utilities, insurance, education | Zero | A card that does not exclude them, or accept it |
Build your miles card stack
One card never covers everything. Put in what you actually spend and see which cards to hold together, and what to put on each.
Build my stack→The verdict, restated
The least fussy 4 mpd card in the market, and the one with the widest set of legitimate workarounds. Online groceries alone justify it for most households. Three things worth knowing on day one: the cap is S$1,000, travel earns nothing extra, and every transfer costs S$27.25, so move points in blocks.
Citi Rewards product page and Citi’s published exclusion list, effective 16 December 2024. Rates, fees and caps correct as of 5 August 2026. The monthly bonus cap is Citi’s official 9,000 bonus points figure; the full transfer partner list beyond KrisFlyer and Asia Miles is not confirmed. This guide shares my own experience for education, it is not financial advice, and card terms change: always verify with the bank before applying.