Citibank UAE has doubled the joining bonus on its Cash Back Credit Card. The welcome statement credit is now AED 300, up from AED 150, and the qualifying condition is unchanged: AED 6,000 of spend within 60 days.
The card’s own product page states it in three places, including the hero and the apply CTA.
The condition that actually disqualifies people
The spend threshold is the easy part. The restriction worth reading twice is who qualifies at all:
The welcome offer is applicable only to new Citi Credit Card customers who apply/submit a lead directly through Citi website. Applicants reaching Citi website through a web search advert or any third party link do not qualify.
Two traps in one sentence. You must be new to Citi credit cards — an existing Citi cardholder taking a second card does not qualify. And you must arrive at the application directly, not via a search advert or a comparison-site link. Clicking a sponsored result for “best UAE cashback card” and applying from there can cost you the AED 300, and nothing on the application flow will warn you.
Type the Citi address into the browser yourself.
What it changes about the card
Not much, and that is the honest answer. AED 300 is a one-time credit on a card whose case rests on its ongoing rates — 3% on non-AED spend, 2% on groceries and supermarkets, 1% on everything else, uncapped.
Our full review treats the welcome credit as excluded from the steady-state value for that reason. The doubling makes year one better; it does not change whether the card earns its place in year three.
It is worth noting what the 3% non-AED rate actually nets: Citi charges a 2.99% foreign-currency fee, so spending abroad earns roughly nothing after the fee. The cashback that matters here is the 2% on groceries and the 1% floor, both in dirhams.
The fee, unchanged
No annual fee in year one. From year two the AED 300 fee (AED 315 with 5% VAT) is waived if you spend AED 9,000 in the year — a threshold most regular users clear without trying.
Verified against citibank.ae on 4 August 2026, and re-read on 31 October 2026: AED 300 for AED 6,000 in 60 days, the direct-application rule and the AED 9,000 fee waiver are unchanged. Citi gives the offer no end date, so we re-check it each quarter. Our card data previously carried the AED 150 figure; this was Citi raising the offer, not a correction on our side, so it is not in the corrections log — the editorial policy explains the distinction.
