Do Your Points Expire? Hotels Run a Clock. Most Airlines Do Not.

The short answer

Hotels run a clock. Most airlines do not.

Three of the four big hotel programs give you 24 months of inactivity before your points are forfeited. The fourth, IHG, gives you 12 — half the time, and nobody mentions it.

Run the other way, four of the five major US airline programmes have no expiry clock at all. Southwest’s terms say flatly that “points do not expire”; Delta, United and Alaska all publish no-expiration policies. American is the only major US carrier still operating an inactivity rule, at 24 months. So the counterintuitive advice is: your airline balance is the safe one, and your hotel balance is where the deadline lives.

And the trick almost everyone recommends to keep a balance alive — transfer some points out and back in to “reset the clock” — does not work at Marriott. Marriott’s own help page, dated 13 April 2026, lists gifting and transferring points as activities that specifically do not count toward maintaining active status. In both directions.

If you hold a Marriott balance and you have been quietly moving points to an airline programme to keep them alive, the balance has been on borrowed time since the day you started.

The rules, as written

Program	Inactivity window	What resets the clock	Elite exemption
Marriott Bonvoy	24 consecutive months	Earning points or miles, redeeming, or purchasing points at least once every 24 months	Lifetime Elite accounts are currently not subject to the expiry policy — but the terms reserve the right to change that
Hilton Honors	Any consecutive 24-month period	A stay in the Hilton Portfolio, earning points from any third-party source (including a Hilton Honors Amex), or purchasing points	None stated in the FAQ
World of Hyatt	24 consecutive months	Receiving points, redeeming them, partner activity, purchasing points, or having an active Hyatt credit card associated	None stated; forfeited points cannot be reinstated
IHG One Rewards	12 months — Club level	At least one “earn” or “redeem” transaction posted every 12 months	Elite members’ points do not expire as long as elite status is maintained

All four figures come from the programs’ own terms or FAQ pages, quoted above with their page dates. IHG’s terms carry a “last updated 24 June 2026” line; Marriott’s help article is dated 13 April 2026.

The three things that actually surprise people

1. IHG is half the length of everyone else’s. Twelve months is a year of inactivity. If you have a Club-level IHG balance and you travel once and then stop, you have one year — not two — before it is gone. Elite members are exempt entirely, which is a genuine structural difference between IHG and the big three: at Marriott, Hilton and Hyatt, status does not protect your balance from the inactivity rule.

2. Transferring points out of Marriott does not keep them alive. Marriott’s help page is unusually direct about this. Under “Please Note” it states that activities which do not count include “Gifting or Transferring Points to another Member” and “Receiving Points as a Gift or Transfer.”

This is the one worth sitting with. The widely-repeated workaround — move points to a partner and back — is precisely the activity the program excludes. It is also worth knowing what Marriott does count, because the list is long and several entries are free:

• Earning points from a Marriott Bonvoy co-brand credit card
• Earning from a bank partner (ICBC, Ping An and others are named)
• Purchasing points online for your own account
• Converting points to miles and back
• Points transferred from BetMGM to Bonvoy
• Marriott Bonvoy points earned from Tours and Activities
• Starbucks earning during a Marriott Bonvoy Week

A co-brand card spend is the lowest-effort reset in the list: it takes a purchase you were probably going to make anyway, and it qualifies.

3. “Free night” redemptions are not always free of consequence. IHG’s terms state that use of the one night per year provided to IHG One Rewards credit card holders does not constitute an “earn” or “redeem” activity to prevent point expiration. Hyatt has a related carve-out: if you redeem points for an award reservation and then cancel it or no-show, that does not count as a redemption. So a redemption that looks like activity on your statement can be worth nothing for expiry purposes.

What it costs when you get it wrong

Marriott does not publish an expiry value, so this is arithmetic rather than a quoted figure, and we label it as such.

A Bonvoy balance of 30,000 points covers roughly one mid-tier night or a couple of nights at a lower-tier property. At NerdWallet’s 2026 valuation of Marriott points at 0.7 cents each — down from 0.8 the year before after a program-wide devaluation — that balance is worth about $210.

Forget the clock for two years and you have forfeited $210 in one step, with no warning message that functions as one. Hyatt makes the irreversibility explicit: once points have been forfeited, “the World of Hyatt points cannot be reinstated.”

How to check your own clock

Each program shows you the date differently, and this is worth knowing before you need it.

• Marriott — on the web, log in and go to Activity, then filter to All Qualifying to see the date of your latest qualifying activity; your account expires two years after that date. On mobile, the expiration date appears beside your points balance. If there is no recorded activity at all, the page tells you that outright rather than guessing.
• IHG — the terms require an earn or redeem transaction every 12 months, so this is the one to set a calendar reminder for.
• Hilton and Hyatt — both reference the account’s activity history rather than publishing a date on a single canonical page.

Good to know in 2026

• Bonus earn against a hotel stay is generally enough — but check the specific program’s definition of “activity” before you rely on it. All four programs count a stay, but they differ on transfers, purchases and cancellations, and those differences are exactly where the traps are.
• No fixed-calendar expiry in these four programs. These are inactivity rules: the clock runs from your last qualifying activity, not from when you earned the points. A five-year-old balance with recent activity is fine; a three-month-old balance with two years of silence is gone.
• Wyndham Rewards is the odd one out among the majors, with a rule often described as roughly 18 months of inactivity plus a separate four-year expiry tied to the earning stay — i.e. it carries a fixed maximum age as well as an inactivity window. We have not pulled Wyndham’s own terms for this post, so we are not publishing its rule; if you hold Wyndham points, read the terms directly.
• Booking through a third-party site does not protect your balance. Several of these programmes count card spend and direct earns but exclude some partner and opaque-channel activity. The expiry rule and the earn rule are not the same rule.
• A devaluation is a separate risk from an expiry. Marriott’s points dropping to 0.7 cents in 2026, while hotel prices rose only about 2.6% over the same period, means a balance you carefully kept alive is worth less than it was. Keeping points is necessary; it is not by itself value preservation.

Now the airline half of the story — and it inverts what most people assume

We published the hotel rules first and told readers we could not reach airline terms pages from here. We were wrong about that, and it turned out to matter: four of the five major US airline programmes have no expiry clock at all. This is the opposite of the hotel picture, and it is the more useful half of the story.

Airline programme	Inactivity clock	What its own terms say
Southwest Rapid Rewards	None	“Points do not expire.” Forfeiture only if you close the account
Delta SkyMiles	None	“Under the SkyMiles Mileage Expiration policy, miles do not expire”
United MileagePlus	None	No activity requirement in the current Rules; mileage is maintained until redeemed or forfeited under the listed triggers
Alaska Atmos Rewards	None	“Atmos Rewards points do not have an expiration date and may remain in an account indefinitely”
American AAdvantage	24 months	The only major US carrier still operating an inactivity clock

So if you fly one airline and bank miles for a trip years out, the airline balance is the safe one. The exposure is on the hotel side, where three of four programs run a 24-month clock and one runs 12.

“Unlimited” is not unconditional. Each of the four ties loss of miles to the account closing, and the triggers differ:

• Southwest — points forfeited if you close the account, or on account closure due to death, or on a fraud or rules-violation finding. Southwest also has separate 12-month claim windows that are not expiry: retroactive claims for a qualifying flight, and gifted points must be claimed within 12 months of purchase.
• Delta — account closure for fraud, your own request, non-response to repeated communication attempts, multiple accounts under one name, or violating the program rules.
• United — the six listed forfeiture triggers in the Rules, including prohibited conduct and non-response.
• Alaska (Atmos Rewards) — note the programme has been rebranded from “Mileage Plan”. One genuine fixed-calendar expiry exists, but it is not on redeemable points: Status Points expire on 31 December each year, and they cannot be redeemed for travel in the first place.

American is the outlier, and its rule has two parts that are easy to conflate. The 24-month Qualifying Activity requirement governs mile expiry. Separately, AA can terminate an account as inactive at 36 consecutive months — but only when the balance is zero, there is no open co-branded card, and there are no lifetime benefits or active status. The cardholder carve-out protects against account closure, not against your miles expiring. Members under 21 are exempt from the 24-month rule until their 21st birthday. AA also offers a buy-back within 24 months of expiry, priced $60–$2,000.

What we could not verify

Stating the boundary of the research, which is the same standard we hold our own pages to:

• Wyndham Rewards is named above as the likely fixed-expiry outlier among hotels, but its rule is still not published here. We have not reached a Wyndham terms page that states it, and we will not publish a rule we cannot quote.
• Loyalty-programme rules change. Several of the pages above carry no visible last-updated date (Hilton’s and Hyatt’s among them), so we have dated what we can date and named the source for the rest. Read the terms before relying on them for a large balance.
• One secondary source — Autopilot’s September 2026 round-up — was used only to cross-check the hotel windows and to identify programmes we had not yet reached. It sources no rule on this page, and the first version of this post wrongly reported that airline terms were unreachable; that has been corrected above against each airline’s own terms.