Do Airline Miles Expire? All 22 Programs, Checked August 2026

There are twenty-two programs on this site and only three expiry rules between them. Five programs never expire miles at all. Eleven put a clock on the account that any activity resets. Six expire miles on a fixed date, and nothing you do in the account moves it.

Knowing which of the three you are holding is the whole thing. People do not lose miles because a rule is harsh. They lose them because they assumed their program worked like the last one they used.

Every program, and its rule

Program	When miles expire	What resets the clock
Delta SkyMiles	Never	Nothing to reset
United MileagePlus	Never	Nothing to reset
Southwest Rapid Rewards	Never	Nothing to reset
JetBlue TrueBlue	Never	Nothing to reset
Atmos Rewards (Alaska & Hawaiian)	Never, but see the account clock below	Any activity keeps the account open
Avianca LifeMiles	12 months with no earning	Earning only. Redeeming does not count
Frontier Miles	12 months with no earning	Earning only. Cardholders are exempt
Cathay Asia Miles	18 months with no activity	Any earn or redemption
Qantas Frequent Flyer	18 months with no activity	Any earn or redemption
Air Canada Aeroplan	Paused until 30 November 2026, then 18 months with no activity, applied retroactively	Any earn or redemption
Etihad Guest	18 months with no qualifying flight	Flying Etihad or a partner airline, and nothing else
American AAdvantage	24 months with no activity	Any earn or redemption
Air France-KLM Flying Blue	24 months with no earning	Earning only. Elite members are exempt
British Airways Avios	36 months with no activity	Any earn or redemption
Qatar Airways Avios	36 months with no activity	Any earn or redemption
Iberia Avios	36 months with no activity	Any earn or redemption, but not an Avios transfer
ANA Mileage Club	End of the 36th month after you earned them	Nothing. Diamond and million milers are exempt
EVA Infinity MileageLands	36 months from the travel or transfer date	An award redemption plus an EVA or UNI international flight extends unexpired miles
Singapore KrisFlyer	End of the 36th month after you earned them	Nothing free. A paid renewal buys six more months
Lufthansa Miles & More	36 months, falling at the end of that quarter	Nothing. Elite status or the co-brand card exempts you
Turkish Miles&Smiles	End of the third calendar year after you earned them	Nothing free. A paid extension is offered
Emirates Skywards	Three years after earning, at the end of your birthday month	Nothing. Platinum status or the co-brand card exempts you

Checked against each program’s published terms in August 2026. Expiry rules move, and three of these programs changed theirs in the last two years, so treat the table as current rather than permanent.

Group one: never expires, but the account still can

Delta, United, Southwest and JetBlue mean it literally. A balance sits there forever with no activity of any kind, and there is nothing to manage.

Alaska is the one worth reading twice. Alaska removed mileage expiry in 2023 and kept the policy through the rebrand to Atmos Rewards, so the points have no clock. The account does. Twenty-four months with no earning or redeeming and it can be frozen for security, which a phone call undoes. Leave it three years in total and the account can be closed with the balance inside it.

That applies to former HawaiianMiles balances too, because since 1 October 2025 they are the same program. If you converted a Hawaiian balance and have not touched it since, that is exactly the account this rule was written for.

Group two: the clock resets, and it is nearly free

Eleven programs expire miles only after a period with nothing happening on the account. Every one of them resets in full on a single qualifying transaction, of any size. One mile earned from a shopping portal saves a balance of 200,000.

Two details separate them, and both catch people:

Redeeming does not always count. LifeMiles, Frontier Miles and Flying Blue extend on an earn, and spending miles leaves the expiry date exactly where it was. Burning 5,000 miles to save the rest is a reasonable move in Avios or Asia Miles and does nothing at all in LifeMiles.

Etihad narrowed what counts to flying. Etihad Guest miles expire after 18 months without a qualifying flight on Etihad or a partner airline. Credit card transfers, shopping partners and mileage purchases no longer extend them. It is the strictest activity rule in the table and the one most likely to be remembered wrongly, because it used to work like everyone else’s.

Aeroplan’s clock is paused, and the restart has teeth. Air Canada suspended points expiry through 29 November 2026. On 30 November the 18-month inactivity rule comes back, and it looks backward: an account with no activity in the 18 months before that date loses its balance when the rule resumes, rather than getting a fresh clock. Any single earn or redemption before then protects everything. If you hold a dormant Aeroplan balance, this is the one date in this article worth putting in a calendar.

The three Avios programs sit at the generous end at 36 months, which turns out to be its own trap. Three years is long enough to forget an account exists. One footnote separates them: at Iberia, moving Avios between accounts does not count as activity, while at BA and Qatar it does. We wrote up how the Avios clock works and the fastest ways to reset it separately.

Group three: fixed date, no reset

ANA, EVA Air, KrisFlyer, Miles & More, Turkish and Emirates expire miles on a schedule set when the miles land. Flying, earning and redeeming change nothing. Miles earned in March 2024 die in March 2027 whatever else the account does.

The mechanics differ in ways worth knowing:

• ANA and KrisFlyer count to the end of the 36th month after the earning month, so everything earned in a month dies together on the last day of a month three years out.
• EVA Air counts 36 months from the travel date, or from the date a partner transfer was applied. It is the one program in this group with a free extension built in: redeem any award miles and fly EVA or UNI Air internationally in the final twelve months, and unexpired miles extend 36 months from that travel date.
• Miles & More rounds to the end of the quarter, which usually buys a few extra weeks.
• Turkish counts calendar years, not rolling months. Miles earned in February 2024 and in November 2024 both die on 31 December 2027, so miles earned late in a year are worth noticeably less time than miles earned early.
• Emirates counts three years to the end of your birthday month, which is the only expiry date in the table that depends on who you are rather than when you earned.

Three of the six sell you time back. KrisFlyer renews miles for six months at a published fee, Turkish offers a paid extension, and Emirates reinstates expired miles for a fee within limits. Status and co-brand cards exempt you in several of them. None of that is free, and none of it is something to rely on.

Does buying miles reset the clock?

This is the question we actually get asked, so it is worth answering plainly.

In the activity-based programs, a mileage purchase normally posts as an earn and resets the clock like any other. That is a real side effect worth knowing about, though it is a poor reason on its own to buy: the cheapest reset is a few miles from a shopping portal, not a purchase.

Etihad Guest is the documented exception. Buying miles does not extend Etihad Guest miles any more. Only flying does.

In the fixed-date programs, buying extends nothing. Miles you buy arrive with their own clock running from the date they land, which for most of that group means 36 months, and the miles already in the account keep the dates they already had. Buying into KrisFlyer in August does not save the KrisFlyer miles that expire in September.

What this means if you are about to buy

The rule we work to, and the one we will tell you on the phone:

1. Buy close to the redemption. Miles bought for a trip you are booking this month have no expiry problem in any of the twenty-two programs. Speculative balances are where expiry bites.
2. Check the balance you already hold before topping it up. If the account is in group three, find out what dies and when. Topping up an account that is about to lose 60,000 miles is a bad trade you can avoid by ordering after the expiry date rather than before it.
3. Confirm the program you are actually in. The Hawaiian and Alaska merger caught people out for a year, and Qatar’s QMiles became Avios. A rule you looked up for a program that no longer exists is not a rule.

Prices and delivery windows for every program above are on their own pages, and a quote states the full cost before anything is agreed. Nothing is charged on this site.