Crypto.com Card Fees Change October 1: Ruby, Jade and Indigo Lose Fee-Free Spending Abroad (2026)
From October 1, 2026, Crypto.com’s paid card tiers stop being fee-free on foreign spending. Ruby keeps €400 a month free and Jade and Indigo keep €800, but everything above that is charged 2.0% outside the EU and UK. There is also a smaller change that is easier to miss: those tiers now pay 0.2% on spending inside the EU and UK, where they previously paid nothing at all. The inactivity fee rises from €5 to €6 on the same date. Only the top tiers — Icy White, Rose Gold and Obsidian — still spend abroad without a transaction fee.
Jump to a Section
- What Exactly Changes on October 1?
- What Does This Actually Cost You Per Month?
- What Is the 0.2% Charge Most People Will Miss?
- What Happens to the Inactivity Fee?
- Do the ATM Limits Change Too?
- Should You Move Tier, or Move Card?
What Exactly Changes on October 1?
Until September 30, only the free Midnight card carried a foreign transaction fee. Every paid tier spent abroad without one. That was a large part of why people staked into Ruby and Jade in the first place.
From October 1 that stops being true for the middle of the range. Here is the before and after, taken from Crypto.com’s own European fees page.
| Tier | Until Sep 30 | From Oct 1 — inside EU/UK | From Oct 1 — outside EU/UK |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midnight (free) | 0.2% / 2.0% | 0.2% | 2.0% |
| Ruby Steel | No fee | 0.2% | Free to €400/mo, then 2.0% |
| Jade Green / Indigo | No fee | 0.2% | Free to €800/mo, then 2.0% |
| Icy White / Rose Gold | No fee | No fee | No fee |
| Obsidian | No fee | No fee | No fee |
The structure is now a monthly allowance rather than a blanket exemption. Under the allowance nothing changes for you. Over it, you are paying a rate that is in line with an ordinary bank card.
What Does This Actually Cost You Per Month?
The allowance is what decides whether this matters, so the honest answer depends entirely on how much you spend abroad. Here is the arithmetic on the outside-EU/UK rate.
| Monthly foreign spend | Ruby (€400 free) | Jade / Indigo (€800 free) |
|---|---|---|
| €300 | €0 | €0 |
| €600 | €4.00 | €0 |
| €1,000 | €12.00 | €4.00 |
| €2,000 | €32.00 | €24.00 |
| €2,000 — per year | €384 | €288 |
For someone who taps the card on holiday twice a year, this is close to nothing. For someone living abroad, working abroad, or paying foreign-currency subscriptions and suppliers through the card, it is a few hundred euro a year that did not exist in September.
The dividing line is roughly the allowance itself. If your normal month sits under €400 on Ruby or €800 on Jade, you can stop reading here — nothing about your setup changed.
What Is the 0.2% Charge Most People Will Miss?
Almost all of the coverage of this change is about the 2.0% outside the EU and UK. The quieter part is the other column.
Ruby, Jade and Indigo previously paid no foreign transaction fee at all. From October 1 they pay 0.2% inside the EU and UK. There is no allowance on that one in the published table — it applies to the spending itself.
Two-tenths of a percent is small enough to ignore on a coffee and large enough to notice on a flight. On €1,000 of in-Europe foreign-currency spending it is €2 a month, or €24 a year. That will not change anyone’s life, but it is worth knowing that a card advertised to you as fee-free within Europe is not fee-free within Europe any more.
It also matters for the comparison you may be about to make. If you are weighing this card against another one, you have to compare against 0.2%, not against zero.
What Happens to the Inactivity Fee?
It goes up on the same date. The published wording is that €5 per month of inactivity is charged after 12 months of no cardholder-initiated activity, and that “effective 1 October 2026 fee will be updated to €6”.
The trigger has not changed — it is twelve months with no activity you initiated, and it stops once activity resumes. If you have a card sitting in a drawer from a staking period you have long since exited, this is the line to check. A single small purchase resets the clock, and that is cheaper than €6 a month.
Do the ATM Limits Change Too?
The ATM structure is separate from the foreign transaction change, and it is worth reading alongside it because the two interact when you travel.
| Tier | Free ATM per month | Above that |
|---|---|---|
| Midnight | €200 | 2% |
| Ruby Steel | €400 | 2% |
| Jade / Indigo | €800 | 2% |
| Icy White / Rose Gold | €800 | 2% |
| Obsidian | €1,000 | 2% |
Daily, monthly and yearly withdrawal caps are the same across tiers at €2,000, €10,000 and €75,000. Note that the ATM operator’s own charge sits on top of all of this and has nothing to do with the card — that is the fee the machine offers to “convert” for you, and declining the conversion is almost always the cheaper choice.
Should You Move Tier, or Move Card?
Moving up a tier to escape the fee is a bigger decision than it looks. The tiers above Indigo require substantially more capital locked in staking, and locking capital to avoid a few hundred euro of annual fees only makes sense if you wanted that position anyway. Work out the fee you would actually pay first, using the table in section two, and compare it against what the extra stake costs you in flexibility.
The more useful question for most people is whether a card that was chosen for one specific reason still wins on that reason. If you hold Ruby or Jade mainly because foreign spending was free, that reason is materially weaker from October 1 — not gone, but capped.
If you are re-opening the comparison, the things worth lining up are the foreign transaction rate, any monthly allowance, the top-up route and its cost, and whether the card is actually issued in your country. That last one disqualifies more cards than the fee table does.
🔗 Comparing alternatives
If this change has you looking at other crypto cards, the comparison that matters is fee structure and country coverage rather than headline cashback.
FAQ
Does this affect cards issued outside Europe?
The figures above come from the European fees page, which applies to users with a residential address in Europe. Crypto.com publishes separate fee pages for the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore and other markets, and the structures differ. Check the page for the region your card was issued in rather than assuming these numbers carry across.
Is the allowance per card or per account?
The published table states the allowance per calendar month against the tier. If you hold more than one card, confirm in the app how the allowance is counted before assuming it doubles.
Does spending in euro inside the EU count as a foreign transaction?
A foreign transaction fee applies to transactions processed in a currency other than the card’s own. Spending euro on a euro card inside the eurozone would not normally trigger it. The 0.2% applies where a conversion happens within the EU and UK — for example paying in Polish złoty or pounds on a euro card.
Will the fee-free tiers change later?
Nothing published says so. The pattern here — a benefit that was unlimited becoming an allowance — is worth keeping in mind for any card whose main selling point is a fee waiver, but that is an observation, not a prediction.
Sources
- Crypto.com Help Center — Prepaid Visa Card Fees and Limits (Europe), retrieved September 26, 2026. Source of all tier figures, allowances and the “effective 1 October 2026” wording.
- Crypto.com Help Center — Card Fees & Limits (regional index), for readers whose card was issued outside Europe.
Fact-checked against the issuer’s own published fee page on September 26, 2026. Card terms change, and the figures above apply to cards issued to European residential addresses — confirm the current schedule for your own region in the app or on the official fees page before acting on anything here. This article is informational and is not financial advice.
Disclosure: Fat Cat Card is a comparison site I run, and card signup paths on it can carry affiliate links. Readers pay nothing extra.
