What an Award Rate valuation is — and what it is not
A valuation answers one question: when should I pay with points instead of money? If a redemption returns more cents per point than our published figure for that currency, spending points is the better of the two options in front of you. If it returns less, pay cash and keep the points for something better.
That is the whole of it. A valuation is a decision threshold, and it is deliberately a boring one. It is not a market price, it is not an appraisal of your balance, and it is not a promise that any particular seat exists.
The formula, in full
One observation is one award redemption priced against one cash alternative. Its value in cents per point is:
cash comparable − cash paid at award bookingpoints required× 100
The numerator is what you avoided spending. The denominator is what it cost you. Everything contentious in points valuation is a disagreement about how to fill in those two terms — which is why the rest of this page is about exactly that.
The published figure for a currency is the median of every observation for that currency in the quarter, taken across the whole basket rather than per route. We report the median of observations, not the median of route medians, because the second of those silently upweights thin markets where award space barely exists.
The sampling frame: which routes and properties we price
The basket is fixed. It was set in the Q1 2025 model and is reviewed once a year, in December, for route relevance only. Freezing it matters more than choosing it well: a valuation that moves because we changed which routes we price is not a measurement, it is an edit.
Air: 49 route-and-cabin cells
| Band | Routes priced | Cabins | Cells |
|---|---|---|---|
| US domestic short-haul (under a thousand miles) | LGA–ORD · DAL–HOU · LAX–SFO · ATL–MCO | Economy | 4 |
| US transcontinental | JFK–LAX · EWR–SFO · BOS–SEA | Economy, domestic first / transcon business | 6 |
| US–Hawaii | LAX–HNL · SEA–OGG | Economy, first | 4 |
| US–Caribbean and Mexico | JFK–SJU · LAX–SJD · MIA–PUJ | Economy | 3 |
| US–Europe | JFK–LHR · ORD–FRA · BOS–CDG · IAD–ZRH | Economy, business | 8 |
| US–Asia | SFO–NRT · LAX–ICN · SEA–HKG · JFK–SIN | Economy, business | 8 |
| US–Middle East and India | JFK–DOH · EWR–DEL | Economy, business | 4 |
| US–South America | MIA–GRU · IAH–SCL | Economy, business | 4 |
| US–Oceania | LAX–SYD · SFO–AKL | Economy, business | 4 |
| Intra-Europe and intra-Asia | LHR–FCO · CDG–ATH · NRT–BKK · SIN–DPS | Economy | 4 |
| Total | 49 | ||
Hotels: 44 properties across three segments
| Segment | Representative brands | Markets | Properties |
|---|---|---|---|
| Select-service and airport | Hyatt Place · Courtyard · Hampton · Holiday Inn Express | Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Orlando, Manchester (UK) | 14 |
| Upper-upscale urban | Hyatt Regency · Marriott · Hilton · Kimpton · Crowne Plaza | New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Chicago, Los Angeles | 18 |
| Luxury and resort | Park Hyatt · Ritz-Carlton · Waldorf Astoria · InterContinental · Conrad | Maui, Cancún, Dubai, Bangkok, Paris, Tokyo | 12 |
| Total | 44 | ||
The basket is deliberately weighted toward trips people actually take. There is more domestic economy in it than a points enthusiast would choose, and less first class than a highlight reel would contain, because the median is meant to describe an ordinary redemption. If you only ever fly transatlantic business class, your realized value will run above our published figures — and the per-currency notes on the valuations page tell you which currencies reward that pattern most.
How the cash comparable is chosen
The cash comparable is the fare or rate you would have bought instead, captured in the same session as the award price so the two are contemporaneous. Five rules govern the choice, and they are the rules that do most of the work in this model.
- Same product, not the cheapest product. An award that earns a full main-cabin seat is compared with a main-cabin fare, never with the basic-economy fare beneath it. An award night in a standard king is compared with the cash rate for a standard king, not with the chain’s cheapest room type on the night.
- Same operating carrier and flight numbers. A partner award on ANA metal is priced against ANA’s own cash fare for that flight, not against the cheapest itinerary between the same two cities.
- Cheapest publicly bookable fare, all-in. Taxes and mandatory fees are included on the cash side. Optional ancillaries — seat selection, bags, Wi-Fi — are excluded from both sides, because a valuation should not depend on how much luggage you carry.
- Winsorised at the 95th percentile. If the contemporaneous cash fare sits above the 95th percentile of that route-and-cabin’s trailing twelve-month distribution, it is replaced by the 95th-percentile value. This is the single most consequential rule in the model and the main reason our figures are lower than most published elsewhere.
- Refundability is matched, not ignored. Awards in most programs cancel back to points for free. Where they do, the cash comparable is the cheapest fare with equivalent change terms if one exists within a fifth of the non-refundable price; otherwise the non-refundable fare is used and the difference is not credited to the award. We would rather understate the currency than launder a flexibility premium into it.
Why we publish the median rather than the best redemption
Award value distributions are severely right-skewed. A handful of redemptions in every program return several times the typical figure, and a mean would let those few observations set the number for everyone. The median is the honest summary of a skewed distribution, and it has a property a mean does not: it is the value you have a fifty-fifty chance of beating.
The cost of that choice is that our numbers look pessimistic beside sites that publish something closer to a best case. They are meant to. If your redemptions consistently beat our figure, you are redeeming better than the median — which is the point of learning any of this.
We also publish the interquartile spread internally and use it to decide what to publish at all. A currency whose middle fifty per cent of observations spans more than a full cent is flagged as unstable and its per-currency note says so, because a single median hides a great deal when the distribution is that wide.
How taxes, fees and carrier surcharges are handled
Every award has a cash component. Government taxes, security fees, airport charges, and — the expensive one — carrier-imposed surcharges. All of it is subtracted from the cash comparable before the division, which means a program that levies a large surcharge on a transatlantic business award scores lower than one that does not, on the same seat, on the same day.
This is not how most published valuations treat surcharges, and it is a large part of why our figures differ. A mileage price quoted without its cash companion describes half a transaction. On the routes where surcharges bite hardest, the difference between the two treatments is worth several tenths of a cent per mile — enough to reorder the table.
Hotel awards get the same treatment in reverse: where a program waives resort fees on award nights and a competitor does not, the waived fee is part of what the points bought and is credited to the currency. That single rule accounts for a meaningful share of the gap between the strongest and weakest hotel currencies in our model.
How fixed-value redemption floors enter a bank currency’s number
A transferable bank currency is two things at once: an option on every partner it reaches, and a fixed-value redemption you can always fall back on. Most people use the fallback more often than the option. A model that prices only the transfers would describe an enthusiast, not a cardholder.
So for each bank currency we sample both, and combine them in the proportion that real redemptions occur. That proportion comes from two sources: the redemption mix issuers disclose in their own reporting, and our annual reader survey — 3,412 responses in January 2026, weighted to the balance distribution the same survey reports. Neither source is perfect. Both are named here so you can discount the number accordingly.
This is why Chase Ultimate Rewards is valued at 1.9¢ rather than at the value of its best partner: the fixed-value floor is a large share of actual redemptions, and it pulls the median down. It is also why the floor is worth understanding as a benefit rather than a limitation — it is the reason a bank point can never be worth nothing.
What the model deliberately excludes
What a model leaves out determines its number as much as what it includes. Here is the complete exclusion list, with the reasoning for each.
- Awards we could not actually book
- Every observation is carried to the program’s own payment screen before it counts. Phantom space — an award that displays and then fails at ticketing — is the single most common way a published valuation gets inflated, because the seats that never ticket are disproportionately the cheap ones.
- Cabins with negligible award availability
- A cabin enters the basket only if the programs we track released bookable saver space on at least a fifth of sampled dates. Lufthansa first class fails that test and is excluded, which is why our Star Alliance numbers look lower than valuations built on it.
- Elite-only and status-dependent value
- Suite upgrade awards, Globalist breakfast, waived close-in fees and elite award discounts are worth real money and are not in the model. A valuation should describe the currency, not the member.
- Transfer bonuses
- A transfer bonus changes how many points you receive, not what one is worth after it lands. Folding bonuses into a valuation double-counts them the moment you multiply the valuation by a bonused balance.
- Speculative and manufactured itineraries
- No positioning flights, no married-segment tricks, no fuel-dumping, no error fares, no fifth-freedom routings priced against a cash fare a normal traveler would never buy.
- Cash fares above the 95th percentile of their own route history
- Comparables are winsorised at the 95th percentile of that route-and-cabin’s trailing twelve-month fare distribution. Pricing an award against a last-seat walk-up fare is how hotel currencies get valued at two cents and airline miles at eight.
- Basic economy and non-comparable fare products
- An award that earns a full main-cabin seat is compared with a main-cabin fare, not with the stripped basic-economy fare underneath it. Comparing unlike products inflates every domestic number in the model.
- Cash-out floors that do not exist
- Only currencies with a published fixed-value redemption carry a floor in the model. Airline miles have none, which is exactly why they are riskier to hold than the arithmetic alone suggests.
How often the model is revised, and what triggers an off-cycle change
The model is republished quarterly, on the first business day of the quarter. The current model is Q3 2026, published . The previous quarter’s figure is published alongside the current one for every currency, so a devaluation appears as a visible change rather than as a quietly edited number.
| Trigger | What we do |
|---|---|
| A program publishes, withdraws or rewrites an award chart | Immediate re-sample of that currency, published within ten business days with a changelog entry. |
| A transfer ratio changes, or a partner is added or dropped | The partner tables are corrected the same week. The valuation is revised only if the change moves the trailing median. |
| The trailing 90-day median moves more than a tenth of a cent from the published figure | Flagged for the next quarterly publication. We do not chase noise between quarters. |
| A reader or another publisher demonstrates an error | Corrected and logged under our corrections policy, with the previous figure left visible rather than overwritten. |
Every revision is logged publicly in the valuation changelog, with the direction of the change and the reason for it. The log is not a marketing artefact — it is the only way to check whether the claims on this page are true over time, which is why it includes the quarters where we were wrong.
Where this model can be wrong
Four known weaknesses, stated plainly, because a methodology page that only lists strengths is marketing.
- The basket is American. It is built around US originations and it will understate programs whose value lies in intra-Asia or intra-Europe short-haul. A reader based in Singapore should treat our airline numbers as directional rather than local.
- Availability is measured, not modeled. We record whether space was bookable on the dates we sampled. We do not attempt to model how hard it was to find, and “findable with two hours of searching” and “findable instantly” score identically. That flatters the programs with the worst search tools.
- Hotel award nights are priced one property at a time. Footprint is not in the arithmetic. A currency with a fixed chart and few hotels can score above a currency you can actually spend where you travel, and the per-currency notes have to carry that caveat rather than the number.
- The floor mix is estimated. The share of bank-currency redemptions that go through a fixed-value portal is the least certain input in the model. If it is wrong, every bank currency is wrong in the same direction — and by more than any other single assumption here.
Conflicts of interest, and who pays for this research
Award Rate is funded by affiliate commission from credit card issuers. When a reader is approved for a card through a link on this site, we are usually paid. That arrangement is disclosed on every page that displays an offer, and it creates an obvious incentive to publish valuations that make card bonuses look larger than they are.
Four controls exist against that incentive, and they are checkable rather than promised.
- The valuations are computed by the data team, who have no access to revenue reporting by card or by issuer. The people who know which cards pay best do not touch the model.
- No issuer, airline or hotel group is given sight of a figure before publication, and none has ever been offered the opportunity to comment on one.
- Bonus values across this site are derived from these numbers rather than typed in, so a cut propagates automatically to every card page, including the most commercially valuable ones. This quarter 4 currencies were cut, and the largest of those cuts reduced the headline value of the card bonuses that earn it immediately and without discussion.
- Valuations are never used as a ranking input in a way that advertising could reach. Where a commercial relationship exists with a card whose currency we downgraded, the downgrade stands and the ranking moves.
If you believe a number here has been shaded commercially, the changelog and the sample sizes are the evidence to argue with, and we would rather have the argument in public. Our editorial policy and advertiser disclosure set out the rest.
Reproducing, citing and challenging these numbers
The valuation table is published as a citable dataset with a license, a canonical URL and a quarter stamp, and the how to cite this page block on the valuations page gives the exact form. Quote the quarter with the figure; a valuation without its quarter is a rumour.
We will supply the underlying observation set — route, date, cabin, program, points required, cash comparable, cash paid — to researchers, journalists and other publishers who ask, under the same attribution terms. Write to editors@awardrate.com with the quarter and the currencies you need. If you find an error in it, tell us and we will log the correction with your name on it.
Where a guide works a single redemption end to end, the record behind it is published in the same form: the query as entered, where it was entered, the prices returned, the derivation, and an explicit statement of which figures are independently confirmable today and which are point-in-time observations. The worked example on the beginners guide is served at /evidence/worked-example-2026-07-14.json. We do not publish screenshots of an airline's or a hotel's own booking interface: a dynamically priced fare on a date that has passed cannot be re-derived from an image, so a screenshot would imply a proof it cannot carry.
Frequently asked questions
Is a point valuation a price I can sell my points at?
No. A valuation is a benchmark for deciding between two ways of paying for the same trip. It is not a market price, it is not an offer to buy, and most programs prohibit selling points outright. If you cash a balance out at the program’s own fixed rate you will almost always get less than our valuation, because our figure includes transfer redemptions that the cash-out option does not.Why is your valuation lower than the one on other points sites?
Two reasons, both structural. We publish the median rather than a headline redemption, so half of our sampled redemptions come in below our own number. And we winsorise cash comparables at the 95th percentile of each route’s own twelve-month fare history, which removes the walk-up fares that make a mile look like it is worth several cents. A valuation built on the best case is a description of the best case.How large is the sample behind each number?
Sample sizes are published beside every figure and range from 3,120 to 22,400 priced redemptions per currency for Q3 2026, across 184,620 observations in total. A currency with fewer than a thousand usable observations is not published at all; it is marked as derived and stated conservatively.Do you include taxes and carrier surcharges?
Yes, and they reduce the valuation rather than being footnoted away. The cash you pay at the time of an award booking is subtracted from the cash comparable before the division, so a program that adds several hundred dollars of carrier surcharge to a transatlantic business award scores lower than one that does not. That single choice is most of the gap between our numbers and valuations that quote the mileage price alone.How often do the valuations change?
Quarterly, published on the first business day of the quarter — the current model is Q3 2026, published August 6, 2026. Off-cycle revisions happen when a program publishes or withdraws a chart, or when a demonstrated error needs correcting. Both the current and the previous figure are shown on the valuations page so a devaluation is visible rather than quietly edited away.Does advertising influence the valuations?
No. The valuations are computed by our data team, who have no access to revenue reporting by card or issuer, and no issuer, airline or hotel group sees a figure before publication. Because welcome-bonus values across this site are derived from these numbers, a cut lowers the headline value of the cards that pay us most — and we publish it anyway. Our changelog exists so you can check that claim against our own record.