CommBank is closing Awards. Here's what it actually costs.

CommBank is closing the Awards program on 29 September 2026 and replacing it with Yello points.

I noticed because I was checking something else entirely, and it turns out this affects me more than most people writing about it — 240,031 of my 448,321 Qantas Points originally came through CommBank.

So I sat down and worked out what it actually costs me. Not what it costs in theory. What it costs in points, per month, out of my account.

What's changing

The rate is the bit that matters. It used to take 2.5 Awards points to make one Qantas Point. It will take 3 Yello points. That's a 17% haircut on every dollar you spend.

The fee going from $90 to $149 is a 65% increase, which is its own conversation.

What that costs me, in actual points

In August my CommBank card put 3,814 Qantas Points into my account. Same spending, under the new rate, would have produced 3,178.

So: 636 points a month. About 7,600 a year. Plus $59 more in fees.

It's not a catastrophe. But it's a 17% pay cut on my single biggest recurring source, and the price goes up at the same time.

The thing I wasn't expecting

While I was working this out, I did something I'd never bothered to do: I stripped the one-off sign-up bonus out of my numbers and looked at where my points actually come from month to month.

Most of my points aren't coming from the credit card at all. They're coming from the supermarket.

In August, Everyday Rewards alone put 10,000 Qantas Points into my account — more than double what the card did. The single biggest non-bonus line item in either month was a 7,000-point hit from Everyday Rewards on 14 August.

I've spent two years thinking of the credit card as the engine and the supermarket as the rounding error. I had it exactly backwards.

And Everyday Rewards is completely unaffected by any of this. It still converts at 2,000 Everyday Rewards points to 1,000 Qantas Points, automatically, once your accounts are linked.

So what am I actually doing about it

Less than you'd think.

I need 8,279 more points to fully fund the trip. The program closes in about forty days. I'll cross the line before any of this takes effect, which means the change doesn't threaten the trip at all — it affects what I build after the target.

And that still matters, because Qantas put Classic Reward prices up by 5–20% in August 2025, the first rise since 2019. My booking window doesn't open until September 2027. If they do it again in that window, "fully funded" quietly becomes "not quite".

So I'm treating 456,600 as a floor rather than a finish line, and carrying on.

The Yello change takes about 636 points a month off me. One well-timed gift card promotion at the supermarket covers it.

The card wasn't the engine. The supermarket was.