Mumbai: Card issuance in India picked up sharply in June, with banks adding roughly 11.4 lakh new credit cards during the month. That is the strongest monthly addition in more than two years and it pushed the country's outstanding card base to about 12.15 crore, according to data put out by the Reserve Bank of India.

Spending held up too. Total credit card spends came in at ₹2.01 trillion in June, up 9.8 per cent from a year earlier and marking the second month running that the figure stayed above the ₹2 trillion mark. May had recorded ₹2.02 trillion, so on a sequential basis the number was essentially flat — but flat at a level the industry only occasionally touched a year ago.

The card base grew 0.95 per cent over May and 9.36 per cent over June 2025. The pace of additions is notable mainly because issuers had been holding back. Through much of the past two years, banks slowed down new acquisitions in response to rising stress in unsecured lending and higher risk weights on card receivables. Monthly net additions had settled into a range of roughly seven to ten lakh cards. June broke out of that range.

Among the big issuers, HDFC Bank added 1,63,511 cards to take its base to 2.67 crore, staying comfortably ahead of the field. SBI Cards was close behind with 1,62,664 additions, taking it to 2.25 crore, while ICICI Bank added 1,51,352 cards to reach 1.95 crore. Axis Bank was the outlier among the top four with 48,636 additions, ending the month at 1.62 crore cards.

The spending picture was more uneven. HDFC Bank's card spends rose 16.2 per cent year-on-year to ₹59,432 crore and SBI Card posted the sharpest jump — 34.4 per cent — to ₹41,077 crore. ICICI Bank went the other way, with spends slipping 5.2 per cent to ₹31,410.9 crore. Axis Bank managed a marginal 1.4 per cent increase to ₹22,174.8 crore.

Part of what is driving the divergence is a shift in who is issuing. Private banks remain cautious on unsecured exposure and asset quality, and have leaned towards cross-selling to existing customers rather than chasing new-to-credit borrowers. Public sector banks, meanwhile, have found an opening in UPI-linked credit — RuPay credit cards, where their issuance franchise is stronger and distribution is wider. That channel has been quietly adding both cards and transaction volume.

For context on how far the market has travelled: India had fewer than six crore credit cards in circulation at the start of the decade. The base crossed 10 crore in mid-2024 and 12 crore this year, while annual spends went from under ₹6 trillion to ₹23.62 trillion in FY26, a rise of nearly 12 per cent over the previous financial year.

What happens next depends largely on how issuers read the credit cycle. Industry watchers have been pencilling in monthly additions of around one million cards for the rest of the calendar year, with spending growth staying in single digits. June came in ahead of that expectation. Whether it marks a genuine turn in issuer appetite or a one-month blip will be clearer once the July and August numbers land.