How Much a Credit Card Point is Worth: Our Valuations

Australian Frequent Flyer recently released its very first Frequent Flyer Point Valuations. That analysis found that Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, Qatar Airways Privilege Club and Cathay offer the most valuable frequent flyer points for Australians.

As part of our research, we also did a similar analysis of the average value of one point in Australian credit card and payment platform loyalty programs that let you transfer points to a range of different airline programs.

This analysis could help you to determine a ballpark figure for the value you might be able to get when redeeming points with different Australian credit cards.

It also makes it easier to compare the value of points across different bank programs. However, keep in mind that different credit cards offer different earn rates. Our analysis only considers the redemption value of one point.

How our model works

As with frequent flyer programs, it’s impossible to give an exact value of credit card reward points because the value depends on how you use them. Nonetheless, we’ve developed a model that aims to give an average value of a point that’s as accurate as possible.

We’ve included PayRewards in this category, which is the flexible rewards program of payment processing platform Pay.com.au. For full disclosure, this company is affiliated with Australian Frequent Flyer. However, this did not influence the outcome as we’ve applied exactly the same standards to our analysis of PayRewards points as we have with every other program.

How we calculated the value of a credit card reward point

For our Credit Card Point Valuations, we’ve used the same “basket” of 16 typical redemptions Australians might use their points for as we did for our Frequent Flyer Point Valuations.

To calculate the value of redemptions on the ground, such as gift cards, we’ve simply divided the cash value of the reward by the number of points required to get it.

However, to redeem credit card reward points for flights or airline upgrades, you would typically first transfer your points into the frequent flyer program of an airline that partners with your bank. For example, you might convert your Amex Membership Rewards points into Cathay Asia Miles to redeem for a Cathay Pacific flight.

So, for each flight redemption, we’ve calculated the value you could expect to get for each bank point when transferring your points to the bank’s three airline program partners that offer the highest value for that particular reward. In doing so, we’ve accounted for the rate at which the credit card points transfer into each airline program.

By taking the average of the top three values, bank programs with a higher number of transfer partners are effectively rewarded as there is a higher pool of transfer partners to choose from – and therefore a higher chance of the top three values being higher. (Bank programs with lots of transfer partners also got a bit of a boost through our weightings – more on this later.)

By the way, you can use AFF’s Credit Card Points Transfer Assistant or see our Australian Credit Card Points Transfer Matrix to easily find out which programs you can transfer bank reward points into, and at what rates!

After calculating the average redemption value for each of the 16 items in our basket, we’ve then removed the highest and lowest value for each program. This creates a “trimmed mean”, preventing random outliers from skewing the result.

Qualitative weightings

We’ve then applied a weighting based on three different criteria which impacts the usefulness of each program. These weightings may increase or decrease each valuation by up to 10%.

The three criteria we used in determining these weightings were:

• Number of useful transfer partners
• Does the program give notice before changing redemption or transfer rates?
• The credit card program’s points expiration policy

You can read more about these weightings at the end of this article.

Our Credit Card Point Valuations

Without further ado, here are our Credit Card Point Valuations:

Please note that these figures are based on the data we used when calculating our Frequent Flyer Point Valuations in July 2025. We will update these figures when we do an update of the underlying data behind both sets of point valuations later this year.

Star Alliance Rewards takes the top spot

As you can see, Star Alliance Rewards has the highest value of all of the Australian credit card reward points that we included in our analysis.

This is the program belonging to the HSBC Star Alliance credit card. The points earned with this card are particularly valuable because you can transfer them at a 5:4 rate to your choice of seven different Star Alliance airline programs.

The next most valuable points belong to Amex Membership Rewards. Its Ascent Premium variant, for customers with a Platinum charge card, had a slightly higher average point valuation than the regular Membership Rewards program because Ascent Premium points can also be transferred to Qantas Frequent Flyer.

Amex Membership Rewards points can be transferred to 13 different airline and hotel programs (or 14 if your card offers Qantas Frequent Flyer as well). Most transfers are at a 2:1 rate, although there are some exceptions.

Which programs did less well?

The loyalty programs offered by the “big four” banks, as well as the Amplify program of St.George, Bank of Melbourne and Bank SA, were towards the bottom of the list. This was mainly because these programs offer fewer airline transfer partners, and transfers are typically at a 3:1 rate instead of 2:1.

For example, St.George Amplify Rewards only has three transfer partners – Velocity, KrisFlyer and Everyday Rewards.

One final caveat: While CommBank Awards currently performs reasonably well, this is due to its high number of current transfer partners. From 1 October 2025, you’ll only be able to transfer CommBank Awards points into Velocity Frequent Flyer! This will almost certainly bring down our valuation of CommBank Awards points significantly when we next update our figures.

Our credit card program weightings

For anyone who’s interested, the weightings we applied to the credit card and payment platform programs included in our analysis are based on these three criteria:

Rating	Number of useful transfer partner programs (40%)	Gives notice before changing redemption/transfer pricing? (30%)	Points expiration policy (30%)
Very good	Large number of useful airline and/or hotel transfer partners, including all major Australian programs	Program must give lots of notice before changing partners/transfer rates; no history of unannounced changes	Points never expire
Good	Large number of useful airline and/or hotel transfer partners, but one or more major Australian program excluded	Program must give a reasonable period of notice before changing partners/transfer rates; no history of unannounced changes	Long expiration date (more than 2 years), activity based
Average	3+ useful transfer partners	Gives notice before making major changes	Expiration of 1-2 years, activity based
Poor	2 useful transfer partners	T&Cs allow program to change partners/conversion rates at any time without notice	Activity-based expiration under 1 year, or time stamping expiration policy with long time limit (3+ years)
Very poor	0-1 useful transfer partners	T&Cs allow program to change partners/conversion rates at any time without notice; and program has a history of doing so	Time stamping with short time limit and/or specific activity types required to prevent expiry

And here’s how each program fared:

Program	Number of useful transfer partner programs	Gives notice before changing redemption/transfer pricing?	Points expiration policy
Amex Membership Rewards	Good	Good	Very good
Amex Membership Rewards (Ascent Premium)	Very good	Good	Very good
ANZ Rewards	Average	Poor	Poor
NAB Rewards	Average	Poor	Poor
Westpac Altitude	Average	Average	Very good
St.George Amplify	Poor	Average	Very good
CommBank Awards	Very good	Very poor	Very good
PayRewards	Very good	Average	Average
Star Alliance Rewards	Good	Poor	Average