United Offering Up to a 100% Bonus When Purchasing Miles

Update: The offer mentioned below has expired and is no longer available.

United Airlines MileagePlus members are being targeted with a promotional offer when purchasing miles. Offers vary depending on the member, but you could be targeted for up to a 100% bonus. This promotion is valid through December 22, 2022, at 11:59 PM CT.

Let’s take a closer look at the offer.

Table of Contents

United’s MileagePlus Miles Bonus
Is Buying United MileagePlus Miles Worth It?
Final Thoughts

United’s MileagePlus Miles Bonus

United Polaris interior from rear IFEs — United Polaris business class. Image Credit: United

The first thing you’ll need to do is log in to your account to check what you’ve been offered. Then you can work out whether you personally will get value from buying miles with this promotional offer. Although folks are being targeted for different bonuses with this offer, at best you’ll see the ability to score a 100% bonus on purchased miles. For this promotion, the more miles you buy, the better bonus you’ll receive.

Here’s the breakdown:

Buy 5,000 to 19,000 miles and get a 40% bonus
Buy 20,000 to 49,000 miles and get a 70% bonus
Buy 50,000 to 87,500 miles and get a 100% bonus

If you’re targeted with the 100% bonus, a maximum of 175,000 miles can be purchased for a total of $3,292 — that’s a discount of 50% on the usual price of $6,584.

With 175,000 miles, you could score a round-trip business class flight with United from New York to London or from Los Angeles to Tokyo with tens of thousands of miles to spare.

Is Buying United MileagePlus Miles Worth It?

Let’s do the math.

If you were to max out this promotion, you’d end up snagging the 100% bonus on the purchase of miles — that means instead of purchasing miles for the usual 3.5 cents per mile, you’d get them for 1.88 cents apiece.

However, note that this price is still 0.58 cents more expensive than what we value United MileagePlus miles at (1.3 cents apiece).

Hot Tip: Buying miles can be a quick and easy way to boost your MileagePlus account. However, if you’d rather not fork over that kind of cash, there are many more ways you can earn yourself a ton of MileagePlus miles without handing over excess cash.

Let’s take, for example, a round-trip flight in business class with United from San Francisco (SFO) to London (LHR) using miles. This would set you back 120,000 MileagePlus miles.

With the promotion, it would cost you $2,257.50 to buy the necessary miles outright. That’s nearly $2,000 cheaper than the lowest fare we were able to find for a round-trip cash fare in business class.

So, if you were sitting on a zero balance in your MileagePlus account and were insistent on flying to London in business class, buying miles using this promotion would save you quite a bit of money.

This is one of the lowest cash fares we could find, and often round-trip business class fares between San Francisco and London can go for several thousand dollars, so it’s likely that you would save yourself quite a bit of money with this promotion if you were to purchase miles needed for a redemption you already were keen on making.

Then again, if you have no specific trip in mind and already have miles in your account, it’s probably not a great idea to buy miles just for the sake of it.

Final Thoughts

United is targeting MileagePlus members with promotional rates on purchasing miles. While there are savings to be had, it’s not always a good idea to purchase miles unless you have a specific trip in mind. If you do opt to purchase miles, consider using a United co-branded credit card to maximize your earnings!