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Yes, American Airlines AAdvantage® miles expire if you have no earning or redemption activity on your account in a 24-month period. Per the AAdvantage® FAQs page:
“Just earn or redeem miles on American or with an AAdvantage® partner at least once every 24 months. We’ll automatically extend your mileage expiration date 24 months from the date of your most recent qualifying activity.”
There are two exceptions to the AA mileage expiration rule. AA members under the age of 21 are not subject to the mileage expiration policy. In addition, you aren't subject to expiration if you are the primary account holder on an AAdvantage co-branded credit card.
AA miles that have expired can be reinstated for a fee.
Credit Card Expiration Exemption
If you hold an AA co-brand credit card, you are in luck: Your miles are safe since they are no longer subject to the expiration policy. Eligible American Airlines co-branded cards include:
- Citi® / AAdvantage® Executive World Elite Mastercard®
- Citi® / AAdvantage® Platinum Select® World Elite Mastercard®
- CitiBusiness® / AAdvantage® Platinum Select® Mastercard®
- Citi® / AAdvantage® Gold World Elite™ MasterCard®
- AAdvantage® Aviator® Red World Elite Mastercard®
- American Airlines AAdvantage® MileUp®
With these perks, it's easy to justify the annual fee of $99, waived for first 12 months.
- Free checked bags for you and up to 4 companions on domestic itineraries
- Priority boarding to help you win the race for overhead bin space
- A 25% discount on inflight food, beverage, and Wi-Fi purchases
- Earn 2X miles for every $1 spent at restaurants
- Earn 2X miles for every $1 spent at gas stations
- Earn 2X miles for every $1 spent on eligible American Airlines purchases
- Earn 1X mile for every $1 spent on all other purchases
Keeping Your AA Miles Alive
As a rule, any earning or redemption activity will count towards resetting your AA mileage clock validity. You can earn AA miles in any of the following ways to ensure your existing miles don't expire:
- Fly with American or one of its partners and credit the miles you earn to your American Airlines AAdvantage frequent-flyer account.
- Stay with one of the AAdvantage® hotel partners, including big chains like IHG, Hyatt, and Marriott.
- Rent a car from an AAdvantage® car-rental partner.
- Join the AAdvantage® dining program and eat at participating restaurants.
- Click through the AAdvantage eShopping portal before making online purchases.
- Take a cruise or book a vacation with an AAdvantage® partner.
- Spend on your American Airlines credit cards.
- Take online surveys.
- Buy AAdvantage® miles. Posting time ranges from instant to 48 hours.
- Transfer points from Marriott Bonvoy, Bilt Rewards, and several hotel programs to AA.
American Airlines also regularly has special offers and promotions, which let you pick up extra miles as a one-off and keep your account alive.
Redeeming your AA miles
Redeeming your miles will also extend you mileage validity. However principal value to be had is redeeming them for flights, especially if you can take advantage of one of AA Sweet spots. Although other redemption options tend not to be the best value. However, you can still do some good and keep extending your AA miles' validity by donating some miles to a good cause.
Keep Your Miles Active & Save at the Same Time
Wouldn't it be great if you could earn AAdvantage® miles every month without lifting a finger? The Bask Mileage Savings Account earns AAdvantage® miles instead of cash interest. You'll earn 2.5 AAdvantage® miles for every dollar saved annually.![?gdpr=${GDPR}&gdpr_consent=${GDPR_CONSENT_78}&us_privacy=${US_PRIVACY}&cachebuster=[CACHEBUSTER]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
And since Bask Bank deposits miles in your AAdvantage® account on a monthly basis, you'll never have to worry about generating activity to extend your expiration date.
Opening a Bask Mileage Savings Account is hands-down the easiest way to permanently eliminate “stop my American miles from expiring” from your to-do list. There's no limit to the number of miles you can earn, and it's quick and easy to set up. Check out our full review for more details.
Reinstate Your Expired Miles
You can reinstate your expired miles for a fee by calling the AA customer care line; you also can do this online. However, you can reinstate expired miles only under the following conditions:
- You can only reinstate miles that have expired in the last 24 months.
- A maximum of 500,000 miles can be reinstated in a single transaction.
- You can only make one reactivation transaction per batch of expired miles; any miles that expired at the same time and are not reactivated cannot be reinstated later.
Unfortunately, AA is very opaque about what it charges for reinstating expired miles. However, AA says the rate to reinstate your miles depends on the number of miles being reinstated. If you are wondering about out-of-pocket costs, we found the following data point from Travel Summary about reinstating AA miles.
| Number Of Reactivated Miles | Cost Of Reactivation | Cost Per Mile To Reactivate |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | $60 | ₵1.2 |
| 10,0000 | $100 | ₵1.0 |
| 15,000 | $150 | ₵1.0 |
| 25,000 | $225 | ₵0.9 |
| 50,000 | $400 | ₵0.8 |
| 75,000 | $550 | ₵0.73 |
| 100,000 | $700 | ₵0.7 |
| 113,864 | $1000 | ₵0.88 |
One thing to note is that the data is from 2022, so the price of reinstating your miles may have changed since then.
Our Take
AA is not leading from the front regarding mileage expiration policies. Its main U.S. competitors — United and Delta — eliminated mileage expiration. That said, American Airlines' policy is very generous, and you can do many things to ensure your miles don't expire. Hopefully, AA will follow suit and eliminate mileage expiration entirely in the near future.
The comments on this page are not provided, reviewed, or otherwise approved by the bank advertiser. It is not the bank advertiser's responsibility to ensure all posts and/or questions are answered.
Thanks for the update, that plus your recap of ways to maintain my miles, is most appreciated.
However; I am planning to spend down my account as quickly as possible.
I have stopped patronizing American since they broke ties with AwardWallet.
No longer allowing your clients to track our miles (which we own!) and disallowing the 5 miles/posting are just not acceptable business decisions.
Hello Delta and United.
Guys, regardless of what happened with American Airlines, I just wanted to thank you for helping us keep our miles all this time. You guys have always been awesome. 😊👍
If you have any MasterCard, join and participate in SimplyMiles to earn AAdvatage miles.
Here’s the website: https://www.simplymiles.com/
Totally agreed! And here’s our guide to the SimplyMiles program: https://awardwallet.com/blog/earn-bonus-miles-simplymiles-guide/
Thanks to AwardWallet, now I can know the status of all my loyalty programs in one place, with notifications and a very useful dashboard!
In particular, it has helped me to know that my AAdvantage program miles are about to expire and, luckily, I was able to find this post to be able to extend them.
Thanks AwardWallet !!
This is one of the many reasons I’m so glad I found and signed up for Award Wallet. Its been a life and points saver over I want to say close to 10 years now! Thank you for everything you do.
Lots of good content here @ Award Wallet. Now that things are opening back up, it’s nice have this such a great resource available in the travel toolbox.
I can’t tell you how much AwardWallet has made so easy for me to manage my airline and hotel rewards points. Without them I would be losing miles frequently. Thanks to AwardWallet
I am rather new to earning air miles AND using them! I have been notified that my AA miles are due to expire soon. AwardWallet has opened my eyes to opportunities to preserve and add to my AA miles account. I am very grateful.
I truly appreciate the services of AwardWallet. Keeping notified of changes and mileage expirations has been most helpful over the years. 5-stars for the App and services !
Great post. I appreciate you listing out the numerous ways I can both redeem and earn American airline points. Mine are set to expire soon so this will be extremely helpful!
Helpful information as always from Award Wallet! Love the details and easy links for all of these options. Thank you!
Wow, so useful, this is great service to help us keep our miles without throwing them away on buying items we don’t need! My miles had almost expired and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Thank you for your service to the community of frequent flyers.
Thanks AwardWallet for the reminders! So glad I signed up for AwardWallet where all my points can be viewed in one place.
I don’t know why more people don’t take advantage of the AwardWallet and AAdvantage partnership. I told a friend of mine about it yesterday and he said it sounds like too much trouble to do. His AA miles will expire June 30th, and he has over 100,000 of them. I’m betting he will come around though.
Award Wallet to the rescue!
I became an Award Wallet paid member about 4years ago when I got into earning Awards Points on many travel programs. I had the Barclay’s Aviator Red card until 2019 when Barclay’s gutted many benefits. So now I have 158k miles about to expire! Receiving update emails about upcoming expirations makes Award Wallet an essential tool for everyone to have! Thank you Award Wallet!
Thanks very much for the alert that I had expiring AA points, and tips on how to keep them active for another 18 months. As we all have, I have limited business and personal air travel for the last several months and for the next few months at least.
On another note, AwardWallet has definitely helped me track and manage loyalty points in several airline, travel and other programs, and I have recommended it to a few friends!
I had failed to track that point expiration was restarted with AA. My AwardWallet Account notified me via email. Without it my miles would be toast soon. Other airlines have instituted a no expiration policy while AA keeps it up. Would be good for them to come into the fold to simplify our lives during these time.
Awardwallet is a free program for tracking airline award mileages and hotel points.
We can save a lot of time to manage multiple accounts with different expiration dates. The account balance will be updated automatically, and an alert notification will be issued when airline miles or hotel points are about to expire.
This is wonderful and absolutely FREE !
AwardWallet makes it so easy to keep track of my AAdvantage mileage expiration. I would have definitely lost out on the miles I had accrued. AwardWallet also made it easy to find ways to help me from letting them expire. Definitely saved me time and hard-earned points from being lost!
Honestly, I had no idea my miles were even expiring until I was notified by AwardWallet so that in itself was helpful. I also just signed up for eshopping to save them.
Award Wallet is the tool you need and the blog posts are excellent
Excelente blog ! todo lo que se necesita saber para aprovechar los programas de millas ! Y extender el vencimiento de nuestras millas.
My husband has always used AW and has finally talked me into it. Saved me from forgetting some expiring points!
-DE
I just learned that my AA miles would be expiring shortly and was about to buy additional miles. Unfortunately I was not able to log into AA website and had to recheck my AA number in Award Wallet where I luckily found a reminder to this great opportunity! Therefore I strongly suggest that you always check AwardWallet first prior to buying any additional miles.
This was a timely article given the fluid conditions due to COVID and the resultant impact on the airline industry. This is an especially good resource for a scenario like mine, which is that my miles are expiring and I had to cancel a flight booked with miles (leaving me without a triggering event and running out of time). It’s good to see the options listed all in one spot. I actually hadn’t thought of an awards tracking service, so I signed up while I was here!
By the way, if your miles recently expired, you can pay to have them recovered within 18 months after expiration:
https://www.aa.com/i18n/aadvantage-program/miles/reactivate-miles.jsp
Thanks for showing how to prevent miles from expiring!
Award Wallet is helpful for me. I have my family miles all in the same account.
Are there any UK credit cards you can use to earn AAdvantage Miles – and therefore keep them from expiring? There are lots of options in the States and it would be great to see more offers for UK flyers.
American Airlines lists credit/debit card options for many countries on this page: https://www.aa.com/i18n/aadvantage-program/miles/partners/credit-card/international-credit-and-debit-cards.jsp
However, Europe is notably absent from this list! So, it doesn’t seem that there’s an option for UK cards. The good news is that you can earn 5 AAdvantage miles for leaving this comment! Just make sure that your AAdvantage account is tied to your AwardWallet and you log in to link this comment to your account.
Really happy to discover award wallet today as I have some miles coming up to expire. Also great to load all my accounts in an easy to use interface and stop manually checking and spreadsheeting my miles balances!
I have been an award wallet member for more than 10 years. Today is the first time I clicked on the Blog tab. The discussion is how to earn 5 mile points with AA by simply posting a comment on a blog article. The minimum mile purchase from AA is 2,000 – Cost is $78.99. I would have had to spend this in September. Hopefully, now I don’t.
Award Wallet thank you for this comment program. You have saved me a fair amount of money.
Richard
Muy útil AwardWallet 🙂
THANKS AGAIN Award Wallet for reminding that my miles are soon to expire and for giving me suggestions on how to prevent it.
You have saved me countless times!
I’ve been using AwardWallet for quite some time, and I really appreciate that they keep track of my miles and expiration! I was intrigued by the Bask Savings Account option for future travels, but the amount required to make even the sign up bonus worth it is rather tough during this pandemic. Besides, the miles earned are taxable, which adds a layer of complication. Thank you for giving me the option to earn a few miles by commenting — it will buy me time to use some of these other strategies in the future.
The AwardWallet team continues to deliver on their service to their loyal following of customers. It’s amazing that they figured out a way to actually help customers from losing their expiring points by actually integrating in with a company like American Airlines so customers can earn points via the AwardWallet website. Because of their dedication to customers, our family was able to prevent our two American Airlines accounts’ points from expiring. Thank you so much.
I just renewed my AwardWallet subscription, and received a helpful notification that my AA miles were exporting next month, with a link to this blog post. This is a great service!
This is the easiest way to keep AA miles alive in seldom used accounts (ie my kids). Hopefully it also increases page views for AwardWallet so that they can continue to offer it. I’ve been a paid user for years. Well worth the money!
Just realized that this works with multiple AA accounts being tracked under one AwardWallet account. Super useful for managing kids’ accounts!
As a frequent traveler, I am so glad I found AwardWallet to help keep track of various mileage programs. Looking forward to expanded use!
I am so glad I joined AwardWallet!!! I just saw that my American Airlines points are scheduled to expire in early 2020. I had NO IDEA!!! Thank You!!
Thanks for these. Some really helpful tips here definitely! I think that using your miles for hotels and cars is a really good idea!
Thank you AwardWallet for providing a little bit more peace of mind over the years about a silly, yet important thing: maintaining miles. I heard a few more airlines are eliminating expirations, as United did in August 2019. In the meantime, we’ll need services like these and good ways to get a few incremental miles to renew miles.
Very helpful post. I rely on awardwallet to let me know when points are about to expire. It’s great to see all the improvements to the site over the years, too.
AwardWallet is a great service. I subscribe to the premium service and it keeps track of all my miles/points. Thanks in advance for the 5 AA miles!
Award wallet has been of great value in tracking my miles and expirations. Thanks for the great site!
Oh. Also, their subscription for keeping track of all the different miles in one place is pretty nice. Signed up for that too. Definitely worth the yearly fee.
Heard about AW a year ago and thought I’d post just to see if the miles actually posted to AA. They did. Started using them ever since. You guys are awesome!
Using AwardWallet, I manage the accounts for our whole family without feeling martyred! Your annual fee is well worth paying. Although most of us live in Canada, we do have AA accounts. However, they often verge on expiring, so now I need 5 miles for one of our grandsons. Thanks!
It may be useful for someone else: in Argentina you can earn miles by just using any Santander Rio AAdvantage Card.
AwardWallet has just reminded me about my expiring miles, can´t be more grateful. Acting now to prevent it!
This site is awesome. I am now a subscriber! Thanks guys!
This is great information! I just wish I had signed up for this sight a little sooner as I’m in pretty dire straights with my expiration date looming!
Awesome stuff! Award wallet is the bee’s knees!!
This Tool (Award Wallet) is the best tool out there to track Miles/Point – it can include unlimited Accounts, Unlimited family members and much more~
Award Wallet is helpful for me in tracking my family miles.
My favorite way to get AA miles is their Rewards Dining, as I like to eat out, and that’s easy. I’ve also purchased magazines with miles, Itunes songs, and even donated miles to charity. All work well. Now I’ll try the blog approach. AwardWallet makes it easy to track expirations: Pro Tip, plan ahead, as miles don’t post for 6-8 weeks for most of these methods.