United MileagePlus Offering Up to a 50% Discount When Purchasing Miles [Targeted]

United Airlines MileagePlus members can take advantage of a new promotion when buying miles. Offers vary depending on the amount of miles you purchase, but you can purchase with up to a 50% discount.

This promotion is valid through April 30, 2024, at 11:59 p.m. CT.

Let’s take a closer look at the offer.

United’s MileagePlus Buy Miles Discount

First, you’ll need to log in to your account with your MileagePlus credentials. Then, you can determine whether you will get value from buying miles with this promotional offer.

You may be targeted to score a discount of up to 50% on purchased miles. For this promotion, the more miles you buy, the better the discount you’ll receive.

Here’s the breakdown of our targeted offer, which has a maximum discount of 50%:

• Buy 5,000 to 14,000 miles and receive a 30% discount
• Buy 15,000 to 54,000 miles and receive a 40% discount
• Buy 55,000 miles+ and receive a 50% discount (~1.88 cents per mile)

With United, you only can purchase a maximum of 200,000 miles per calendar year. If you’re targeted with the 50% discount, you can buy 200,000 miles for a total of $3,762.50 after taxes.

There’s plenty you can do with that many United miles. For example, a round-trip business class flight from Los Angeles (LAX) to Tokyo (HND) starts at 140,000 miles.

Is Buying United Miles Worth It?

Let’s do the math.

If you were to max out this promotion, you’d end up snagging the 50% discount on the purchase of miles. 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 significantly more expensive than what we value United MileagePlus miles at: 1.2 cents apiece.

Let’s take, for example, a round-trip flight in business class with United from Washington-Dulles (IAD) to Los Angeles (LAX) using miles. This would set you back about 120,500 MileagePlus miles in business class.

With the promotion, buying the necessary miles outright would cost you about $2,265.40. But, the cash cost of the trip is only $1,196, meaning purchasing the miles is not a good use case in this scenario.

So, if you were sitting on a zero balance in your MileagePlus account, you’d still want to pay cash for this flight vs. spending far more to purchase miles.

It’s usually not a great idea to buy miles just for the sake of it. You can find our current round-up of monthly purchase point promotions.

Final Thoughts

United is targeting MileagePlus members with promotional rates on buying 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 and the cost of the miles purchase is less than the cash purchase.

If you do opt to purchase miles, consider using a United co-branded credit card to maximize your earnings!