Major Qantas Status Changes Coming in 2026

Qantas has today announced a major shake-up to its frequent flyer status tiers, with program changes progressively rolling out from later this year.

While there are a mixture of positive and negative changes, many Australian frequent flyers are likely to be better off.

One of the biggest changes will be the ability to rollover 50% of your “excess” status credits each year into your next membership year. Qantas is also introducing permanent ways to earn status credits on the ground, milestone rewards between lifetime Gold and Lifetime Platinum status, and some extra status tier benefits.

But where there’s good news, there’s also some bad news. Qantas will increase the number of status credits you’ll need to retain your status each year. The airline is also retiring Points Club and Green Tier, in an effort to remove complexity from the program.

The changes will start to come into effect towards the end of 2026, when Qantas introduces status credit rollovers, status credits on the ground and starts to phase out Points Club and Green Tier. The new status credit retention thresholds and lifetime milestone rewards will be introduced in a year from now, so around February 2027.

This guide explains everything you need to know about the 2026 changes to Qantas Frequent Flyer status.

Positive Qantas Frequent Flyer status changes

Let’s start with the good news…

Roll over status credits

Currently, when your Qantas Frequent Flyer membership year ends, your status credits expire. All of the status credits you earned still count towards lifetime status, but your annual balance resets to zero.

That’s changing. From late 2026, Qantas will roll over 50% of the excess status credits that tiered members earn each membership year into the member’s following year, up to a yearly cap.

The annual status credit rollover caps will be:

Status tier	Annual status credit rollover limit
Silver	100
Gold	350
Platinum	500
Platinum One	500

Say, for example, that you earned 200 more status credits than you needed to earn or renew Gold status in a given year. At the start of your next membership year, Qantas will renew your Gold status and roll 100 status credits over to our next membership year.

This means that the extra flying you did in the previous year will give you a head-start to renewing your status in the following year.

If, hypothetically, you didn’t earn any additional status credits in your following year, Qantas would still roll over 50% of those 100 status credits into your next year as well.

Rollover status credits obviously won’t count towards lifetime status, but they do give you an incentive to continue flying Qantas after you’ve renewed your desired status level each year.

Qantas says that, currently, around 50% of status credits go “unused”.

New, permanent ways to earn status credits on the ground

Following the success of its promotion last year, Qantas will permanently introduce ways to earn status credits on the ground.

For each category that you earn at least 1,000 Qantas Points within a single membership year, you’ll earn either 10 or 20 bonus status credits. There are 10 categories and the maximum you can earn in a single year from this is 140 status credits.

These are the 10 categories:

Category
Credit cards
Banking & home loans
Insurance
Car
Home utilities
Hotels & accommodation
Holidays & experiences
Everyday shopping
Retail & lifestyle
Sustainability

New milestone rewards between Lifetime Gold & Platinum

Lifetime Gold status is one of the most sought-after benefits of the Qantas Frequent Flyer program. Once you hit 14,000 lifetime status credits, you get to keep Qantas Gold status for life.

After earning Lifetime Gold, the obvious next thing to aim for should be Lifetime Platinum. Qantas has set the bar for Lifetime Platinum so high – at 75,000 lifetime status credits – that it’s a bridge too far for many.

Recognising that the gap between Lifetime Gold and Platinum is high, Qantas is introducing new “milestone” rewards for members who continue earning lifetime status credits after achieving Lifetime Gold.

Once you earn 25,000 lifetime status credits, you’ll receive a “banked” year of Platinum status that you can choose to activate at any time in the future. You’ll also get a complimentary year of Platinum status upon reaching 35,000, 45,000, 55,000 and 65,000 lifetime status credits. In other words, up to five banked years of Platinum in total.

This benefit will also apply retrospectively. So, if you’re currently sitting on 35,000 lifetime status credits, you’ll get two free years of Platinum to activate when you choose as soon as this change takes effect.

Qantas estimates that around a third of current Lifetime Gold frequent flyers will already be able to access at least one complimentary year of Platinum status straight away.

New benefits added to existing status tiers

From later this year, Qantas will give Silver frequent flyers an additional complimentary airport lounge invitation each year. So, Silver members will get two annual Qantas lounge passes instead of one.

Qantas will also start giving vouchers for things like wine and hotels to frequent flyers based on their status tier.

Negative Qantas Frequent Flyer status changes

The flying kangaroo giveth, and the flying kangaroo taketh. While it would be nice if all the frequent flyer program changes were good, Qantas doesn’t want to make status too easy to earn as this would lead to even more crowded lounges and dilute the benefits for members at each tier.

Here are the changes on the other side of the equation…

Higher status retention targets

Qantas will no longer offer lower status credit targets for renewing an existing status tier. Instead, the number of status credits you’ll need to earn each year to earn or renew status will be the same. They’ll be based on the current “earn” thresholds:

Status tier	Annual status credits to earn OR renew
Silver	300
Gold	700
Platinum	1,400
Platinum One	3,600 (with minimum 2,700 on QF flights)

This means, for example, that a current Platinum member would need to earn 1,400 status credits each year to renew their Platinum status – rather than the current 1,200.

Removal of Loyalty Bonuses

Qantas is removing the Loyalty Bonuses that award members with 50 bonus status credits each time they earn 500 status credits from Qantas or Jetstar flights, up to four times per membership year.

Points Club will be axed

The removal of Points Club is also big news.

Qantas introduced Points Club in 2020 to reward members who earn lots of points from non-flying activities. In return, Qantas Frequent Flyer members who earned enough points to reach Points Club would automatically receive benefits including lounge passes, bonus points with Qantas Hotels and the ability to earn status credits on Qantas-marketed Classic Reward flights.

That ability to earn status credits on flights booked with points is perhaps the most sought-after benefit of Points Club. My understanding is that Qantas is currently considering ways to continue offering this as part of its program, but hasn’t yet committed to anything.

The other Points Club benefits will either be axed or rolled into other parts of the program.

Green Tier gets the chop too

Qantas launched Green Tier in 2022, ostensibly to incentivise sustainable actions like offsetting the carbon emissions from flights.

Over time, Qantas has made it harder to achieve Green Tier. Skeptics would argue that it now does little to actually help the environment. It’s really just become a “hack” to earn an extra 50 status credits or 10,000 points each year by completing a laundry-list of tasks.

While Qantas no longer considers Green Tier worth keeping, it has included “sustainability” as one of the 10 categories for earning status credits on the ground. In the future, we may also see Qantas introducing new incentives for contributing to sustainable aviation fuel.

What Qantas is NOT doing

When Qantas last revealed major changes to its frequent flyer program in 2025, it hinted that it was also looking at adjusting the way members earn status. This led to some speculation that Qantas might follow Virgin Australia’s lead in awarding status credits based on the amount of money spent on flights.

Well, we now know what Qantas had in mind. And the good news is that it has no plans to make its loyalty program revenue-based.

In fact, by many accounts, this approach has backfired for airlines like Virgin Australia and British Airways. Qantas doesn’t intend to make the same mistake!

My overall thoughts on the 2026 Qantas status changes

Qantas says that these changes will give members more flexible ways to earn status and remove unnecessary complexity in its loyalty program. The proposed changes would seem to do exactly that.

Overall, I think these changes make a lot of sense. I personally think I’ll probably be either better off, or at least not too badly affected, as the rollover and ground status credits will help to make up for the higher retention goals.

The Qantas Frequent Flyer program that we see today is based on a legacy model built decades ago, plus a lot of extra components added on top over the years. The result is a relatively complex loyalty program that can be quite difficult to understand.

So, I can understand why Qantas wants to simplify things by removing components like the Loyalty Bonus, Points Club and Green Tier. The good news is that it’s making enough positive changes at the same time to balance things out. If anything, these changes seem to me like a natural evolution for Australia’s most popular frequent flyer program.

I do suspect that some Qantas Frequent Flyer members might be worse off, particularly if they live outside Australia or rely heavily on earning status credits from Classic Reward flights. I’d note that many of the new ways to earn status credits on the ground are inaccessible to people living overseas.

And while I personally might have liked to see the threshold for earning Lifetime Platinum status reduced, I can understand why Qantas wants to keep this tier exclusive. The introduction of rollover status credits and the milestone rewards do at least do something to keep Lifetime Gold members engaged, even if they don’t think they’ll ever make it to Lifetime Platinum!

What do you make of these changes?

So, those are my thoughts. But I’d love to know what you think!

You can share your take on these changes, and read what other Australian frequent flyers have to say, on the AFF forum: