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Yes, Hertz Gold Plus Rewards points will expire if you have no rental or redemption activity on your account in 18 months. Per the Hertz Gold Plus Rewards FAQs page:
“Points do not expire if you have a Hertz Gold Plus Rewards rental activity in the prior 18 months.”
What Counts as Activity
Hertz has a narrow definition of what counts as activity towards keeping your points alive. Again per the FAQs page:
“Activity means a Gold Plus Rewards point was either earned or redeemed on a rental. A Gold Plus Rewards point may only be earned or redeemed on a completed rental.”
While other programs allow a wide range of activities like points transfers and credit card spending to count as activity. However, Hertz is more restrictive and expressly excludes points transferred to partner companies.
“Making a reservation or points transfer to a partner company does not count as rental activity.”
Keeping Your Hertz Gold Plus Points Alive
If you have Hertz Gold points that are about to expire, your options are very limited. In a nutshell, you can only do one of three things:
- Earn points on a completed rental to reset your expiration clock. You earn 1 point per dollar for rental fees as well as:
- Car seat charges
- Insurance options
- Additional mileage charges
- Gas
- SiriusXM
- Redeem some points for a completed rental. This will reset the clock but you must redeem points before the points expire.
- Transfer your points to one of Hertz's airline partners. However, this should generally be avoided due to the poor ratio if your choices are wasting your point on a fruitless rental or having them expire. Then this is the least bad option!
One thing to keep in mind is that you don't need to ever find yourself in a bind with Hertz's points about to expire. You can use AwardWallet to track your Hertz Gold Plus Rewards points. So you should have ample warning and be able to take action to prevent your points from expiring.
Redeeming Hertz Gold Plus Rewards Points
Hertz has a two-tier award pricing. You can redeem your Hertz Gold Rewards points in any of the two following ways:
- Standard Rewards is the standard price. However, bookings do feature blackout dates.
- Any Day Rewards have no blackout dates. This flexibility comes at a premium, with prices double the standard rewards rate.
Keep in mind the pricing differential is huge. After a Hertz Gold Rewards award chart devaluation, a 1 day-free rental standard reward starts at 950 points. However, the same Any Day Rewards will cost you a whopping 1,900 points. So, you are best served to avoid Any Day Rewards bookings!
Boosting your Hertz Status
While being a program member is great news, having elite status is even better and gives a ton of additional perks. Fortunately, you can receive complimentary Hertz Gold Rewards elite status from various travel rewards credit cards as well as other loyalty programs.
If you hold Delta Medallion, United Premier, or IHG Diamond, you will be able to leverage your status for Hertz Five Star status. Plus, cardholders of several premium cards can enroll to get Hertz President's Circle status.
Related: How to Get Rental Car Elite Status for Free
Our Take
On one hand, 18 months is not the most generous expiration policy out there. However, you can extend the expiration of your Hertz Gold Rewards points with qualifying activity. Just make sure to plan ahead as you have limited options for extending the validity of your Hertz points at the last minute.
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 information, so can I redeem my elite status points until January 2022?
Yes, you should be able to redeem your Hertz Gold Plus Rewards points anytime between now and January 2022 – or generate activity to extend the expiration date.
I wish Hertz had an awardwallet point thing like American does.
In the past, we have transferred soon to expire Hertz points to Southwest. It successfully counted as an activity to reset the clock.
It is nice that the EU members also have options to extend the expiration dates.
I rent cars so infrequently that the one Hertz rental I did have was auto-credited to Accor ALL.. which then auto-transferred to Iberia.. which then was combined into British Airways. Sounds silly, but more useful to me than having orphan Hertz points that probably would have expired.
Hertz has been my go to company for years, but since the pandemic, customer service has been very disappointing. Hope they get their act together soon.
I don’t have elite status and had some points expire. Called up customer service and they reinstated my miles with a 6 months extension because of the pandemic. Never hurts to ask.
Hi Stan, how did you get them to reinstate your points? I asked and they said no. I have 7000 points that expired without any notice at all. Customer service is not supportive of this.
It’d be awesome if AwardWallet could track the expiration date for Hertz points. Any chance of this in future?
Yes, we will do our best to implement this in the future. The best scenario would be if the expiration date was shown on the Hertz website. But now you can set the expiration date manually or mark that your points don’t expire.
I rent from Herz quite often so I have elite status. However I guess I also could have received status through one of t credit cards. I’m going to have to look up how to do that because it seems that it’s not automatic or obvious.
Thanks. Curious as to why AW told me today that despite being Presidents Circle my points expire in a months time.
Is that correct or is this article?
I am bit confused as I pay and to be honest rely upon AW.
Hertz announced in January 2021 that all points for elite members will be extended through January 31, 2022. However, it doesn’t look like they’ve implemented this in their system.