Amex India Wiped Membership Rewards on Cancelled Cards: The 30-Day Rule and the 15 November Split, Explained

American Express India has told cardholders that Membership Rewards points tied to cancelled cards have been removed. The company, according to NDTV Profit, blamed a technical issue that left those points on screen after the 30-day redemption window. Cardholders say the points lived in one pooled balance, so they had no way to redeem one card's points before the window closed. From 15 November 2026, Amex says multi-card balances will be split.

The 60-second version

• What Amex says: points linked to a cancelled card must be redeemed within 30 days, or they are forfeited. A technical issue left ineligible points visible. Balances have now been updated. This is NDTV Profit's account of the company's email.
• What cardholders say: they saw one pool, could not pick points by card, and in some cases redeemed after a card was closed without a warning. They want the card-by-card maths.
• The claims: NDTV Profit has not independently verified individual totals. Reported screenshot figures include 311,990, 53,528 and 75,715 points. One X post claims 23,88,090 points removed and a negative balance.
• 15 November: points on two or more basic cards will be held separately, Amex has told customers, rather than as one balance.
• A separate fee change the same day: Live From A Lounge says the 50 percent annual-fee waiver on the Membership Rewards Credit Card goes away on 15 November. The full waiver at Rs 1.5 lakh of spend stays, on that account.

What Amex told customers

NDTV Profit reports that, after earlier confusion, American Express India emailed affected customers. The email said points linked to previously cancelled cards had been removed. The reason given was a technical issue: ineligible points had stayed visible past the redemption period the terms allow.

The rule, as NDTV Profit reports Amex stating it, is narrow. Points linked to a cancelled card have to be redeemed within 30 days of cancellation. If they are not, they are forfeited under the Membership Rewards terms. Amex then said the technical issue had been fixed and the balances brought into line with those terms.

That is the company's account. It is not a published total of how many customers were affected, and NDTV Profit does not quote a rupee value from Amex itself.

Why a pooled balance makes the clawback hard to check

The argument is about identification, not about whether a 30-day clause exists on paper.

NDTV Profit says the Membership Rewards terms define linked basic card accounts of the same customer as accounts where spending is combined and accumulated under one Membership Rewards account. Customers say that is what they saw: a single number. They say they could not mark a redemption as "use the points from the card I am about to close."

The practical complaint, as NDTV Profit summarises it, has four parts.

1. Points from several cards sat in one balance.
2. Some customers closed a card and kept others. They say they were not shown a separate pile for the closed card.
3. Some say they redeemed points after a closure, and Amex processed those redemptions.
4. The adjustment email, NDTV Profit says, does not explain how earlier redemptions were allocated, and does not show points earned, redeemed and reversed for each card.

Sumanta Mandal went further on X, in a post NDTV Profit quotes. He says a support representative agreed that, at the time of closure, even Amex's own staff were not aware of this reading of the rule and so did not warn him. That is his account of a phone call. NDTV Profit does not say it heard the call. He also says he is taking the dispute to the Banking Ombudsman. Filing a complaint is his stated plan, not a finding that Amex broke a rule.

Until Amex publishes the reconciliation, a customer cannot tell a correct forfeiture from a wrong one just by looking at the new balance.

The numbers people are posting

Treat these as claims.

NDTV Profit says screenshots shared by cardholders show adjustments on 9 November 2026 of 311,990, 53,528 and 75,715 points. It then reports two named posts and says the individual claims were not independently verified:

• Sumanta Mandal wrote that 23,88,090 Membership Rewards points were removed and that his balance fell to minus 21,48,040.
• Roshan Agarwal wrote that the points taken off his account were worth about Rs 4.5 lakh. He said cards closed more than a year earlier were now being used to justify the reversal, and that redemptions made after those closures had been accepted. He asked Amex to publish the calculation. NDTV Profit is the source for that description of his post.

A negative rewards balance, if Mandal's screenshot is accurate, would mean the reversal was larger than the points still in the account. That is exactly the sort of case that needs a transaction-level breakdown. This piece does not have one, because the company email described by NDTV Profit does not include one, and the customer posts are unverified.

What changes on 15 November

The clawback and the November product change are related, and they are not the same event.

NDTV Profit says that from 15 November, customers with two or more basic cards will have points maintained separately for each card, not as one overall balance. Existing points will be distributed using the balance associated with each card.

Live From A Lounge, in a 9 October 2026 report on Amex's notice to Indian cardmembers, says this separation was first dated 11 October and then moved to 15 November. Its reading of the notice adds two practical points. Points will not be movable from one basic card to another just to rebuild a single pile. Supplementary-card spending stays attached to the relevant main card. The site's own example: 30,000 points on a Membership Rewards Credit Card and 20,000 on a Platinum Reserve used to behave like 50,000 points. From 15 November they stay on their own cards.

The same October notice, as that report describes it, changes the Membership Rewards Credit Card fee waiver. The renewal fee is Rs 4,500. Spend of Rs 1.5 lakh in the year still waives it in full. The 50 percent waiver for spend between Rs 90,000 and Rs 1,49,999 is being removed. The monthly milestone points on that card are not described as being scrapped. What changes is the counting: eligibility follows the date a transaction posts, not only the date it was made, and some bonus points post at the end of the calendar month.

One more line from that notice, distinct from the clawback. If an amount is overdue when the next statement is generated, Live From A Lounge says Amex will stop point earning from that statement date and block redemptions until the overdue amount is paid.

Live From A Lounge also says new supplementary-card applications were to be paused from 27 October 2026, and that the extra "additional card" used to split spend on some charge cards would go at the same time. Existing supplementary cards were not described as being cancelled. That date has passed. This piece has not seen a separate confirmation that the pause was carried out exactly as the October note described.

Amex, in the material these two reports quote, has not given a public count of how many India accounts were adjusted on 9 November.

What a cardholder can check today

Nothing here is a substitute for the email in your own inbox or the terms on your account.

• Open the Membership Rewards balance and keep a copy of the number you see, and of any adjustment line dated around 9 November.
• If you closed a card and kept others, ask Amex which points it assigned to the closed card, which redemptions it allocated to those points, and which points it says fell outside the 30 days.
• From 15 November, check whether a pooled number has become one balance per basic card, and whether the parts add up to what you held before the split.
• If you hold the Membership Rewards Credit Card and your annual spend sits between Rs 90,000 and Rs 1.5 lakh, the partial fee waiver is the other line to read before renewal. That detail is from Live From A Lounge's account of the notice, not from the clawback email.

What to watch next

1. Whether Amex publishes the reconciliation. NDTV Profit says the email does not show how previous redemptions were split across cards. That worksheet is the difference between a terms enforcement and an uncheckable reversal.
2. 15 November. Separate balances, and the MRCC partial-waiver removal, are the dated changes in the October notice as Live From A Lounge reported it.
3. Complaints. Mandal has said he will go to the Banking Ombudsman. If Amex answers other cardholders with a calculation, that answer matters more than any single X post.
4. Negative balances. If reversals really exceed the points left in an account, those customers will want to know whether Amex is demanding the difference or only setting the rewards balance to zero. The reports read here do not say which.

The 30-day forfeiture is Amex's rule, as NDTV Profit reports it. The open question is how a bank applies that rule to points it spent months showing as one number.

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The email, the technical-issue explanation, the 30-day forfeiture, the single Membership Rewards account for linked basic cards, the absence of a redemption-by-redemption reconciliation, the 9 November screenshot figures of 311,990, 53,528 and 75,715 points, Mandal's claim of 23,88,090 points removed and a balance of minus 21,48,040, Agarwal's claim of about Rs 4.5 lakh, NDTV Profit's statement that those individual claims were not independently verified, and the 15 November split of existing points by card are from NDTV Profit, "Lakhs Of Points Gone Overnight: Amex Cardholders Allege Retroactive Rewards Clawback." The original 11 October date, the move to 15 November, the bar on transferring points between basic cards, the Rs 4,500 MRCC fee, the full waiver at Rs 1.5 lakh, the removal of the 50 percent waiver between Rs 90,000 and Rs 1,49,999, posting-date milestones, the overdue-balance pause on earning and redemption, and the 27 October supplementary-card note are from Live From A Lounge, Ajay, 9 October 2026, "American Express Membership Rewards (India) changes coming November 15, 2026." Where a figure is a cardholder's claim, the sentence says so.