Review: Maybank Family and Friends (2025 Edition) – Get High 8% Cashback on Daily Spend

Last Updated: 28th June 2025

When it comes to the world of credit rewards, 8% cashback is an excellent figure. Such an earn rate can take a significant chunk out of one’s expenditure, and in times where “cost of living” has become a common refrain, there shouldn’t be much of a reason to ignore the Maybank Family & Friends card.

Even miles chasers may be better off choosing 8% cashback over just 4 miles per dollar (as I mentioned in a recent video), so if you’re someone who isn’t after miles you have even less of a reason not to take a second look at Maybank Family & Friends if you aren’t already using one of the best cashback cards we have in the market right now.

Card Details

Card	Maybank Family & Friends
Earn Rate	8% cashback on selected categories
Minimum Spend	S$800 per month
Maximum Rewards	S$150 per month (S$25 per category)
Annual Fee	S$196.20 (free for first 3 years)
Annual Income Requirement	S$30,000

Undiluted 8% effective cashback possible with reasonable conditions

High-earn cashback cards tend to overstate their earn rates, publishing marketing figures that are simply not attainable in practice. In this regard, Maybank should be commended for advertising rates that are indeed obtainable — cardholders can indeed get 8% cashback on their spend each month.

There are of course conditions to be met given such a high earn rate, but the requirements are relatively straightforward: one must reach S$800 of spend each month to unlock 8% cashback that will be awarded on transactions that fall within 6 categories.

Choose 5 out of 10 categories + Malaysian/Indonesian spend

The Maybank Family & Friends card allows cardholders to pick their preferred categories out of a list of 10 for 8% cashback:

• Groceries
• Transport
• Dining & Food Delivery
• Data Communications & Online TV Streaming
• Retail & Pets
• Online Shopping
• Entertainment
• Pharmacy
• Sports & Sports Apparels
• Beauty & Wellness

The choices are pretty wide and should reasonably fit into most people’s spending habits, and you don’t just choose one or two — the card allows you to pick 5 categories. This lets you tailor the card to what your monthly expenditure looks like. Cardholders get the chance to reselect their categories each calendar quarter, offering more versatility in case their spending habits change over time. You may check out an article I wrote on the 5 categories I picked and why.

As a bonus, Malaysian Ringgit (MYR) and Indonesian Rupiah (IDR) spend are their own category on top of the 5 you choose. This is immensely helpful for the occasional JB and Bali trips, and the 8% cashback far outweighs the 3.25% forex fee that Maybank credit card charges. The card also works with Instarem Amaze which means it can continue to be your spending card of choice abroad for 8% cashback on your preferred categories. For MYR or IDR spends, this also means you can get to choose whether to use Amaze or not, and I’ve highlighted why this is useful in an article about the MYR/IDR category.

How Maybank Family & Friends’ MYR/IDR Category Works

The categories have been improving over the years. The Dining & Food Delivery category now includes both restaurant and fast food Merchant Category Codes (MCC), and the significantly broadened Online Shopping category (previously only for fashion spend) makes the card drastically better now that things like Shopee and Heymax vouchers can qualify for 8% cashback. IDR spend recently joined MYR for 8% cashback, and overall the card has become very easy to use.

Sub-limit per category: S$25 cashback or S$312.50 spend each month

Of course, it is not possible for a bank to offer 8% cashback without some sort of gotcha somewhere. For the Maybank Family & Friends, the catch is relatively minor — each category can only get a maximum of S$25 of cashback per month, and this is reached with S$312.50 of spending. This means that if you spend all S$800 of the card’s required minimum spend on a single category, you are only getting S$25 of cashback which is 3.13% cashback instead of the advertised 8%.

You should hence spread your spend across at least 3 different categories to get 8% cashback, but even if you just spent S$800 across 2 categories and get S$50 cashback, that’s still a respectable 6.25% cashback. Moreover, with 5 categories (6, if you are okay to head over JB every now and then), I don’t think it is that difficult for the monthly minimum spend of S$800 to be reached with multiple categories.

The sweet spot is to hit at most S$312.50 per category, and the spend can be tracked with Maybank’s very useful TREATS SG app which helpfully tracks your category spend. Based on my experience, the tracker is updated about a day or two after the transaction is posted, which itself can take one or two days.

S$25 per category across 6 different categories also mean that you can get as much as S$150 of cashback from the 8% earn rate, which is quite a lot of cashback to earn in a month! That’s good for S$1,875 of spend, provided they are distributed evenly across the 6 categories.

Odds and ends

Maybank Family and Friends, for some reason or another, includes 0.3% cashback for AXS payments, but they cap the earn rate on just S$50 per transaction. That’s 15 cents of cashback… which I suppose is better than the nothing AXS transactions get with virtually every other card.

The card is now supported on Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, but those who are reliant on non-Samsung Android phones would find it an annoyance that Google Pay is still not supported.

Conclusion

While many cards get their usefulness and benefits slashed over time, Maybank Family & Friends has actually improved quite a fair bit over the past couple of years. Not only does it continue to offer high 8% cashback, it has also gradually included more transactions to the 8% cashback to make the card easier to use.

Even people who like miles should take a closer look at whether their spend can fit into this card instead. In my books, 8% cashback is only matched by 6 miles per dollar, and only a rare few can meet this earn rate at the moment.

The Verdict

If your spend each month can hit at least S$800 and be spread across 2 or more of Maybank Family & Friends’ categories, this is a very strong card to use as your primary option.

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Seth Wee was a licensed financial adviser representative from 2009 to 2025, with over 16 years of experience in Singapore’s financial advisory industry.

He started Sethisfy.com in 2019 to share practical insights on credit cards, banking products, and miles strategies, helping readers identify financial products that deliver the best value. Seth has been featured in CNA, Channel 8, Today, and a host of other publications. In 2025, he was also part of a panel at CPF’s Ready For Life festival.

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