How Much Are Points and Miles Worth? (Q3 2026 Valuations)

How much is one point worth right now?

Transferable bank currencies occupy the top of the table at 1.5¢ to 1.9¢, airline miles cluster between 1.2¢ to 1.5¢, and hotel points cover the widest range of the three — World of Hyatt at 1.9¢ down to Hilton Honors at 0.5¢. Every figure is the median of roughly 185,000 award redemptions sampled in Q3 2026 and priced against the cash cost of the same seat or room, on the same date, in the same cabin or room class — so half of the redemptions behind any figure returned less than the figure. Sample sizes are rounded to the nearest ten.

The table below is the whole model, row by row: the sample size behind each figure, the previous quarter’s number printed beside the current one, and the mechanism each program uses to set an award price — which is the single best predictor of where a currency lands, for every program that sets its own award prices at all.

On a screen wide enough for the full table, the column headers sort it — by value, by quarterly change, or by sample size. On a phone every currency keeps its own row, so the ranking stays comparable in one scroll rather than becoming sixteen separate cards. Every row links the program’s own award chart or award terms beside the mechanism it documents, so any figure can be checked against the document that sets the price rather than against us.

These are the figures every “worth $X” calculation on Award Rate is derived from, including welcome-bonus valuations in our card comparisons. We revalue every currency quarterly and publish the previous figure alongside the current one, so a devaluation is visible rather than quietly edited away. How we value points →

What is missing from those rows is the why: what drives each currency up, what caps it, the single redemption that sets its ceiling and the habit that pulls most holders below the median. That is set out currency by currency below, grouped into bank, airline and hotel currencies, then the partner programs those currencies transfer into.

Quoting these figures? Always include the quarter — citation forms are at the foot of the page, along with the CSV and the license.

What these numbers mean — and what they do not

A valuation answers exactly one question: on this booking, should I pay with points or with money? If the redemption in front of you returns more cents per point than the figure above, use the points. If it returns less, pay cash and keep them. That is the entire intended use.

Each figure is the median of every sampled redemption for that currency in the quarter. The award is priced against the cash cost of the same seat or the same room, on the same date, in the same cabin or room class, and the cash you pay at the time of booking — taxes, fees and carrier surcharges — is subtracted from the cash side before the division. Cash comparables are capped at the 95th percentile of that route or property’s own trailing twelve-month distribution, so no figure here rests on a walk-up fare nobody pays.

Two limits are worth stating before you rely on any of this. The basket is built around US originations, so a reader flying mostly within Asia or Europe should treat the airline figures as directional. And hotel currencies are priced property by property, which means footprint is not in the arithmetic — a currency with a fixed chart and few hotels can outscore a currency you can actually spend where you travel. The full methodology sets out both weaknesses along with the rest of the exclusion list.

What the transferable bank currencies are worth

These are the currencies to earn. Each one is worth more than most of the airline and hotel currencies it reaches, for a reason that has nothing to do with the exchange rate: while the points sit in the bank they are every partner at once, so you can price a trip in four programs and move points only into the one that charges least. That option has value, and it is spent the moment you transfer.

Each also has a floor — a fixed-value redemption you can always fall back on — which is why none of them can be worth nothing, and also why none of them values as high as its best partner. A large share of real redemptions happen at that floor, and a median has to include them.

What airline miles are worth

Airline miles are worth more per unit than hotel points almost everywhere, because a premium cabin has a high cash price and a chart-priced program will sell it well below that price. Across the whole table, the 4 programs that price at least some awards off a published chart span 1.35¢ to 1.9¢ and the 5 that price off the cash fare span 0.5¢ to 1.35¢ — ranges that meet at the boundary rather than separating, which is why this is a pattern worth knowing and not a rule to bet on. Wells Fargo Rewards and JetBlue TrueBlue carry no classification in our data and are left out of that comparison in both directions.

Note what these figures exclude. There is no elite-status value in them, no close-in fee waiver, no upgrade instrument — and no cash floor, because airline miles do not have one. That absence is why an airline balance is riskier to hold than a bank balance of the same nominal worth.

What hotel points are worth

Three of the four hotel currencies we publish price awards dynamically with no cap, and it shows: they occupy the bottom of the table, and their observation distributions are the widest we measure — which means a single median describes them less well than it describes anything else here. The exception is worth the entire category.

One correction to a comparison people make constantly. A per-point figure is half of a hotel currency’s story, because earn rates differ by a factor of several between chains. The number that decides where to put a stay is points earned per dollar spent multiplied by the figure below — never the figure below on its own.

Where these four sit against other published valuations is mixed, and worth stating plainly rather than implying. Our Marriott and Hilton figures land at the commonly published numbers. Our World of Hyatt figure is higher than most — The Points Guy published 1.6¢ in its August 2026 valuations (thepointsguy.com, read August 6, 2026) — because the 95th-percentile cap on the cash comparable bites hardest on currencies whose award price tracks the cash rate, and Hyatt’s does not. The three that do price dynamically are where our figures come in below a valuation built on peak-rate observations.

What the partner programs are worth

Seven partner programs carry a published Award Rate figure without being sampled at full basket depth: Turkish Airlines Miles&Smiles, Air Canada Aeroplan, Avianca LifeMiles, Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, British Airways Executive Club and Air France-KLM Flying Blue. They range from 1.3¢ to 1.6¢ per point. These are the programs the sixteen-row table above transfers into — the reason a Chase point is worth 1.9¢ is that it can become one of these — and leaving them unpriced meant this page could tell you the best use of a bank point was an Aeroplan business seat and then decline to say what an Aeroplan point was worth.

They are kept separate from the main table deliberately, and the distinction is the whole point of a frozen basket. Each figure above is the median of a quarter of sampled redemptions against a basket that has not changed since Q1 2025. Each figure below is derived from a smaller, program-specific sample, with the basis written out on that program’s own page. Promoting them into the main table would buy roster coverage by quietly lowering the standard the first sixteen are held to, so they sit here, labeled, with the derivation one click away.

What is still missing, stated rather than left to be discovered: ANA Mileage Club, whose round-trip business-class table is named in the Amex write-up above and has no figure here, and the hotel side of this tier entirely — Accor, Choice, Wyndham and Radisson are all reachable from a bank currency on this page and none of them is priced. Both gaps are roster work, not method work, and they are logged in the revision history below as the coverage entries they are.

Revision history since the basket was frozen (Q1 2025)

Every change to this model is logged, including the changes to the method itself. That second kind matters more than the first: a number that moved because awards got more expensive tells you about the program, and a number that moved because we changed the estimator tells you about us. Both are here.

The log begins at Q1 2025, the quarter the basket was frozen, and it is continuous from there — no missing quarters. Figures we produced before that date came from a basket that changed between quarters, which means a move in one of them could have been our doing rather than the program’s; they are not comparable to this series and we do not present them as part of it. That is also why this page carries a January 2, 2025 publication date rather than an older one.

Q3 2026 — what moved and why

The change log, quarter by quarter

Each entry is signed by whoever made the change: NM is Nicholas Miles, Editor. Two sets of initials mean the change was made by the first and signed off by the second. Each name links to that person’s profile, which lists what they are responsible for on this site and what they personally hold.

1. Q3 2026August 6, 2026Methodology changeNM

   Initial publication of the model and this series. The basket, the exclusion rules and the winsorisation policy are documented on this page; the published figures are modeled from that method and are restated as sampling runs land. There is no earlier revision history — this log begins where the site does, and any future change to the method or the figures gets its own dated row here.

Corrections outside the quarterly cycle are logged under our corrections policy, with the incorrect figure left visible beside the fix.

How to cite this page

These figures are published as a citable dataset. Quote them freely with attribution to Award Rate and a link to this page, and always include the quarter — a valuation without its quarter is a rumour, because the number changes and the claim does not travel with it.