How to Transfer Delta SkyMiles to Another Person: The Real Cost

Yes, Delta lets you move SkyMiles into another member’s account. The price has two parts, and the second part is the one that decides whether this is a good idea: 1 cent per mile, plus a flat $30 processing fee per transaction.

The flat fee is why the same transfer can be cheap or absurd depending only on its size.

You move	You pay	Per mile
1,000 miles	$40	4.0¢
5,000 miles	$80	1.6¢
10,000 miles	$130	1.3¢
30,000 miles	$330	1.1¢

Minimum 1,000 miles, maximum 30,000 per transaction. You can send up to 150,000 miles a year and receive up to 300,000.

The shape of that table is the whole article. Topping up a friend’s account by a few thousand miles is one of the most expensive things you can do with SkyMiles. At the bottom of the range you are paying four times what the miles are plausibly worth. At the top the fee dilutes to almost nothing and the transfer is priced sensibly.

The free thing to do instead

You can book a Delta award ticket for anyone, from your own account, for nothing. The passenger name does not have to match the account holder. Spouse, parent, friend, colleague: you book, they fly, no miles change hands and no fee is paid.

If the goal is “my miles, their seat”, that is the entire answer and the fee table above is irrelevant. The transfer buys you exactly one thing the free route does not, which is putting the miles under someone else’s control so they can choose the flight themselves. Worth paying for occasionally. Worth checking first, always.

Delta has no free pooling feature. United does, which is the one place these two programs differ meaningfully on this question.

The cost nobody puts in the table

Move 30,000 miles and the $330 is only the visible half. You also no longer have 30,000 SkyMiles. Replacing them means buying them, and that replacement price is the honest way to value what left your account.

So a 30,000-mile transfer is not a $330 decision. It is $330 plus 30,000 miles of your own future travel. Almost every guide to this question quotes the fee and stops there, which makes transferring look cheaper than it is whenever both parties would have used the miles anyway.

When buying into their account is the better trade

The case the fee table cannot solve: their account is short and yours is not overflowing. They need 70,000 miles, you hold 40,000, and handing yours over produces two accounts that both fall short.

Buying miles straight into the account that needs them fixes it from the correct side. Your balance stays intact, the miles land where the booking will happen, and no transfer fee sits on top.

Two limits worth stating plainly:

• Our minimum order is 50,000 miles. If the shortfall is 3,000, we are not the answer and Delta’s own transfer is, expensive as it looks per mile at that size. We would rather tell you that than sell you fourteen times what you need.
• Delta prices awards dynamically, so the miles are worth whatever the cash fare says on the day. The SkyMiles calculator prices an amount against a real fare and tells you when paying cash beats using miles at all. It says that often enough on Delta that we trust it.

The live rate and delivery window are on the Delta SkyMiles page. Your exact cost is confirmed before anything is agreed, and nothing is charged on this site.

The one thing not to do

Do not move miles by sharing account credentials and booking from inside someone else’s account. The SkyMiles rules are blunt about unauthorised access, and a frozen account holding a six-figure balance costs far more than any fee above. Every legitimate route exists so nobody has to take that risk.

Fees, increments and annual limits checked against Delta’s published SkyMiles terms in August 2026. Airlines revise these, so confirm the current schedule before you commit.