You can’t take those miles and credit-card points with you. A little planning can help you leave them behind.
For some, it may have taken a lifetime to accrue your nest egg of reward points with an airline or credit card, but there is no guarantee your heirs will be able to spend them.
With more ways to earn miles and credit-card points than ever, many older Americans have a bigger gold mine of rewards than they realize. Airlines and other travel-reward programs, though, make it tough to leave them behind. In most cases, airlines will close the accounts of travelers once they die, taking back points that can be worth thousands of dollars.
Yet with some planning, there are workarounds. Sharing frequent-flier login credentials with loved ones will often let them use the points for their own travel—that is, until the airline is informed of the account holder’s death. Some airlines, including United, JetBlue and Frontier, allow a set number of people—in most cases, just family members—to pool miles to get to reward tickets faster.
Financial advisers say more clients are raising questions regarding rewards programs in their retirement and estate planning. Just over 2% of Americans 55 and older have more than 500,000 reward points or miles to their name, according to a May survey of 2,000 adults by the rewards travel search platform Point.me. Many more have smaller balances.
Bill Thorogood, an 81-year-old retiree from Bellaire, Texas, has been trying to help a friend put a big trove of points to use. Over the years, Thorogood’s friend accumulated 700,000-plus frequent-flier miles but is now in assisted living and unable to travel.
“She was using credit cards to pay for everything, and all of a sudden next thing you know she’s got a massive amount of points with one airline,” Thorogood says, adding that they both don’t want her miles to go to waste. Because she has no children, Thorogood’s friend wants to figure out how to donate the miles to a charitable cause.
“She wants to do the right thing,” he says.
Inheritance concerns
Unlike other assets, frequent-flier miles and many other reward points can’t be passed down explicitly in a will.
“The program terms and conditions don’t allow miles to be conceived of as something you ‘own,’ and thus not something you can transfer ownership of,” says Tiffany Funk, co-founder and president of Point.me. (Hotel programs are generally more flexible in allowing points to be transferred free of charge.)
Some airlines, including American and JetBlue, say they reserve the right to approve point transfers after a person’s death, and don’t automatically permit them. To get approval, the person’s estate typically must provide a death certificate, a declaration of who is to receive the rewards, and documentation showing the person’s legal authority. American says it also may delay any transfer for six months or longer to ensure there are no competing claims on the points.
The rules are different for the Rapid Rewards program of Southwest Airlines: Points can’t be transferred to a member’s estate or as part of a settlement, inheritance or will. When a member dies, the account is closed, and the points are forfeited.
Read the fine print
Probably the easiest way to ensure your heirs can use your points is to give them your account login information while you are alive—or in instructions alongside your will. Most airlines allow miles to be used for booking other people’s travel and keep accounts open until they get a death notice. Keep in mind, though, that frequent-flier rewards often have expiration dates.
Gifting or transferring points or miles to a family member or friend is an option, but comes with a fee. For United’s MileagePlus program, mile transfers cost $7.50 per 500 miles transferred, plus a $30 processing fee for each transaction. Transferring a large chunk of points could be on par with paying for a flight in cash.
If you opt to pool miles with loved ones as a way to bequeath them, let someone else be the “pool leader.” Some airlines, like United, dissolve the pool and redistribute the points back to individual members if the person managing the account dies.
Many airlines have portals that customers can use to donate surplus miles or points to charities. Some charitable organizations use them to book travel, while others simply receive cash for the miles or points. Be warned: These donations often aren’t tax-deductible.
As for credit-card rewards, issuers will generally convert any remaining points or miles after a person’s death into a statement credit that can be used to help pay down debt on the card. If the value of the points exceeds that of the amount owed, a check will typically be issued.
Use them, don’t lose them
Melissa Caro, a financial planner and founder of the financial-literacy website My Retirement Network, discovered during a shopping trip to buy makeup at Sephora that her mother was sitting on significant rewards.
“When I dug a bit deeper, I found that she had points on multiple credit cards,” Caro says.
She helped her mom pay for daily expenses with cards that had large rewards balances, using those rewards to pay off what she owed. Caro estimates the rewards added up to around three months of such items as food and gas.
Bottom line, there is no financial advantage to building a rewards nest egg rather than simply using them, says Richard Kerr, vice president of travel at the loyalty program Bilt Rewards.
“Points and miles are not an investment or retirement fund,” Kerr says. “They are not going to get any more valuable than they are today.”
From the Wall Street Journal, written by Jacob Passy. Appeared in the June 9, 2025, print edition as ‘How to Turn Your Credit Card, Mileage Points Into Inheritance’.
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