Do Bilt Points Expire? The 18-Month Rule Takes the Whole Balance

Bilt Points do not expire on individual dates. Under Bilt’s Rewards Terms and Conditions, they stay valid while the account is active, and an account becomes inactive after 18 months with no qualifying activity. At that point every Point in the balance is lost at once, whether it was earned three years ago or last month.

The usual shorthand, that Bilt Points expire after eighteen months of inactivity, is how Bilt’s own terms define “Expiration”, and it is right as far as it goes. What it leaves out is the part that decides what you should do: the clock belongs to the account, not to each Point, and when it runs out it takes everything.

The terms, last updated on 14 July 2026, set this out in two places. The expiry section says Points do not expire while the account is open and active, and that a member will “immediately lose all your Points if your Account status changes to inactive”. The definitions section says an Inactive Account is one with “no activity for 18 months”.

What counts as activity

The same definition lists exactly four things that count:

1. Rent payments or mortgage payments made through your Bilt Membership Account.
2. Qualified purchases made with a Bilt co-brand credit card, which the terms qualify with “if applicable”.
3. Any redemption made using Bilt Points.
4. Any participation in a promotional sweepstakes offered by Bilt.

Three observations follow.

The list is narrower than it reads. Rent and mortgage payments count when they run through the Membership Account. Paying your landlord by bank transfer because it was quicker that month is not activity under this definition. Card spending counts only if you hold a Bilt co-brand card. A member who has moved out and does not hold the card is left with redemptions and sweepstakes, and neither involves earning anything.

A redemption resets the clock for the whole balance. The inactivity definition sets no minimum of its own, but each way of using Points has its own rules: the terms warn that minimum and maximum amounts may apply, and Bilt’s card offer terms require at least 1,000 Bilt Points for a statement credit, for example. The practical rule is that any completed redemption qualifies, provided it meets the minimum for the option you choose. The lesson generalises: wherever the trigger is account-level, the smallest qualifying action protects everything, and the instinct to save a redemption for something worthwhile is the instinct that loses balances.

A sweepstakes entry counts, when one is open to you. Participation in a Bilt promotional sweepstakes sits in the terms alongside rent and redemptions. But a sweepstakes runs only for its entry window, under its own official rules and eligibility conditions, so it is a useful extra rather than something to schedule a deadline around. If you are relying on one, have a redemption ready as the fallback.

Our Bilt Rewards points expiry page carries the rule with the same four resets, and the comparison across twenty programmes is in our guide to points and miles expiry in 2026.

Two families of expiry rule

Almost every programme you hold uses one of two designs, and they fail in different ways.

The first ages each batch separately. On KrisFlyer, the KrisFlyer terms and conditions say miles generally expire after three years, on the last day of the equivalent month in which they were earned, and miles from contests after one year. Basic members can pay to extend expiring miles once, for six months; Elite Silver and Elite Gold members can extend for a year; and PPS Club members’ miles do not expire while they hold the tier, apart from certain promotional miles. The Emirates Skywards programme rules work the same way in outline for adult members: Skywards Miles are valid for three years and are removed at the end of the member’s birthday month after that, and Platinum members’ miles do not expire while they keep Platinum.

The second design runs a single switch on the account, and Bilt is in this family. Nothing is removed while you are active, however old the Points are, and nothing is removed in stages once you stop.

Neither design is automatically safer. A batch rule can wipe out a whole balance on one date if most of it was earned in the same few months, and a shrinking number only tells you that miles have already gone. The real difference is what you can look up. A batch programme attaches an expiry date to each tranche, and Emirates, for one, states that miles expire on the date shown on the account. For Bilt, the date to track is eighteen months from your last qualifying activity.

So a member who pays rent through the Bilt app every month is never near the edge, however old their oldest Points are. A member who moved out fourteen months ago and has done nothing since is four months from losing a balance built over years, including the Points earned the week before the move.

Does Bilt status reset every year?

Partly, and the part that does not reset is the part most write-ups miss. The count restarts every 1 January. The status you earned does not.

Bilt’s terms set four tiers and two standard annual ways to reach each one. The first is Qualifying Points: Points earned in the calendar year from rent, mortgage payments and other spending through the account. The terms explicitly exclude Points from non-spend activity, naming referrals, courtesy Points, Rent Free prize Points, campaign bonuses and survey rewards. The second is the Fast Track: dollars spent in a calendar year on the Bilt Card, in the Bilt Travel Portal, at Bilt Dining restaurants, on linked Lyft rides, on SoulCycle classes booked through Bilt and at other named partners. Rent and mortgage payments do not count towards the Fast Track.

Members get the higher of the two tiers the routes produce. The terms also exclude a long list of card transactions from both routes, including balance transfers, cash advances, gift cards, person-to-person payments, most tax payments and card fees. Separately, some card offers award status under their own terms: the current Bilt Palladium welcome offer, for instance, includes Gold Elite Status after $4,000 of everyday spend within 90 days of opening the account.

Then comes the part that gets lost. Once earned, the terms say, a tier stays valid for the rest of the earning calendar year, all of the following calendar year, and through 15 January of the year after that. Bilt’s own worked example is that status earned at any point in 2025 is kept through 15 January 2027.

Work that through for this year. Cross 125,000 Qualifying Points in February 2026 and Gold runs to 15 January 2028, a little under two years. Cross the same line in November 2026 and it still ends on 15 January 2028, about fourteen months later. The end date is fixed by the calendar year you qualified in, not by the day you qualified, so qualifying early in a year buys more months of benefits for the same spend.

It also means a strong year covers a weak one. Someone who qualifies for Gold in 2026 and then earns little in 2027 still holds Gold through the whole of 2027. And there is one trap on the other side: because the count is per calendar year, Points earned on 30 December and Points earned on 2 January land in different years’ totals. A member a few thousand Points short of a threshold in December cannot carry the shortfall forward.

What the tiers actually get you

Bilt publishes the benefits attached to each tier in a separate Status Benefits Terms and Conditions document. It names no benefits for Blue. For the three tiers above it, the named benefits at the time of writing are these.

Each of those carries conditions worth knowing.

Points interest is paid in Bonus Points, not cash. Bilt sets it month by month at its own discretion, calculates it on the spendable balance on the last calendar day of the month, or the next business day when that falls on a weekend or holiday, and credits it within the first five days of the following month.

BLADE flights. The 10 per cent discount applies to BLADE Basic fare seats booked through the Bilt app or website, paid with the Bilt Mastercard or a card linked to the member’s Bilt Wallet, and it has to be applied at or before booking. The Platinum flight credit is issued for each year a member qualifies for Platinum, not for each year they hold it, is subject to availability, covers BLADE Basic fares only, and is forfeited if the member does not earn Platinum again before the end of the calendar year.

BLADE lounges. Gold and Platinum members get access during operating hours when there is capacity. A member visiting without flying must show proof of status and photo identification with a matching name.

The Virgin Voyages match gives Silver, Gold and Platinum members Blue Extras perks in Virgin Voyages’ Sailing Club. It is not automatic: the member needs an existing Virgin Voyages account, applies through a form in the Bilt app, and should allow at least 14 business days for processing. It covers new voyages booked by 31 December 2026, and the terms say perks will not be applied to existing bookings, so check with Virgin Voyages before counting on them for a cruise you have already booked.

The Flying Blue match is not a gift of miles. It has to be requested from the member’s own Bilt account for their own Flying Blue account, and to activate it a Platinum member transfers 10,000 Bilt Points to Flying Blue, receives the resulting 10,000 Flying Blue Miles and is granted Flying Blue Gold for 12 months. It can be used once per Platinum status period, and the Gold tier drops to Silver at the next qualification period unless the member earns 180 XP on their own. Our explainer on Flying Blue status matches covers what Gold is worth once you hold it.

That last benefit is the only place Bilt status touches airline status. Otherwise Bilt tiers are status within Bilt, and transferring Points to an airline partner moves the Points, not the tier. Nor does status protect a balance: the terms carve out no exemption from the inactivity rule for any tier, so a Platinum member who stops all four qualifying activities is on the same eighteen-month clock as everyone else.

Where Bilt Points can go, including Amtrak

Bilt’s value case rests on transfers rather than its own redemption catalogue. The partner list grew on 23 September 2026, when Bilt announced Amtrak Guest Rewards as its first rail partner and its 26th travel partner overall.

Two Bilt Points become one Amtrak point, so a 1,000-point transfer produces 500 Amtrak points. Transfers go in increments of 1,000 Bilt Points, with a minimum of 1,000 Bilt Points, or 2,000 Bilt Points for members with Blue Status. Bilt says Amtrak redemptions start at 400 Amtrak points, or 100 when using Points and Cash.

A word on ratios, because this is where transferable currencies mislead. A partner added at two to one is not the same kind of partner as one added at one to one, and an addition is not by itself an improvement to what a balance is worth. Our coverage of transferable-currency devaluation makes the general case, and the Bilt Rewards devaluation history records dated changes to the programme itself. Before moving Points anywhere, run the cents-per-point arithmetic in our Bilt redemption grader against the baseline on our Bilt Rewards value page.

For comparison, our guides to Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners, Amex Membership Rewards transfer partners and Capital One transfer partners set out those currencies’ partners and ratios. None of the three runs an inactivity clock of the Bilt kind: Chase and Capital One say their rewards do not expire while the account is open and in good standing, and American Express says Membership Rewards points have no expiration dates. But account closure, payment problems and other breaches of each programme’s rules can still put points at risk; the expiry guide linked above covers each one.

Bilt’s terms list transfers to frequent travel programmes among the ways to use Points, so a transfer reads as a redemption for the purposes of the inactivity clock. But it moves the Points into a programme with its own expiry rule, which may be stricter. Our guide to pooling and transfer strategies covers what a transfer does and does not preserve, and booking award flights with credit card points walks through the order of operations: find the award space first, then transfer.

What to do if you are about to stop renting

The members most exposed to this rule are the ones least likely to be thinking about it: someone between tenancies, or someone who has bought a home and pays the mortgage outside the app.

1. Establish the date of your last qualifying activity. That date, not your last earn date, is what the eighteen months are measured from.
2. Decide which of the four qualifying actions is still open to you.
3. If neither earning route is, plan a redemption that meets its option’s minimum well inside the window. Treat a sweepstakes entry as a bonus, not the plan.
4. If you expect to leave Bilt for good, move the balance deliberately, to a partner whose rules you have checked, rather than letting it sit.

Moving abroad is a different case. The terms offer the programme only to legal residents of the fifty states, the District of Columbia and US territories who are at least 18 and have reached the age of majority where they legally reside, so a member changing legal residence should confirm their continuing eligibility with Bilt. A redemption resets the inactivity clock; it does not settle an eligibility question.

The one date to write down

Take the day of your most recent qualifying activity, add eighteen months, and subtract a comfortable margin; a month is plenty. That is the date by which something has to happen.

Two things commonly go wrong. The first is using the date of your last earn rather than your last qualifying activity. They are often the same day, but not always, and where they differ the activity date is the one the clock runs from. The second is recalculating after every action and then failing to write the new date down.

If you hold Bilt Points and nothing else, a calendar entry does the job. With several currencies under different rules, one ageing miles by the batch, another by your birthday month and Bilt by a single switch on the account, you may prefer one place to keep balances, status and dates together. Miles Mosaic tracks miles, points and elite status across 31 airline and hotel programmes, without asking for loyalty-account passwords.

A note for readers outside the United States

Bilt is a United States programme, open only to US residents, so most of this article is not actionable from Singapore, Sydney or London. The question it raises travels, though: for each balance you hold, do you know which date matters and where to find it? Our advice on surviving devaluations applies with equal force: a balance you are not using is a balance exposed to rules you did not choose.