Qantas is closing Points Club. What that means if you earn without flying.

Most coverage of the Qantas status overhaul is about flyers — rollover, retention thresholds, lifetime milestones. Useful if you're on a plane most weeks.

Almost none of it mentions the part that matters if you're not.

Points Club, Points Club Plus and Green Tier close on 8 December 2026. Points Club was the one piece of Qantas recognition you could reach without ever boarding a plane — 150,000 points a year from groceries, bills and everyday spending. That's the entire premise of how I've built a balance, and of most of what I write here.

There is a replacement. I've run the numbers on it and I don't think it does the job.

What Points Club actually was

Qantas has two parallel ladders. Status tiers — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum — run on Status Credits, which you earn by flying. Points Club ran on points, which you can earn on the ground.

That distinction is the whole thing. Points Club was the only rung on either ladder that a person who never flies could reach.

Two details worth knowing, because they change whether you're closer than you think:

• The 125,000 is per transaction, not per year. A single large sign-up bonus counts in full as long as it's under that number. Many people assume it caps their annual total. It doesn't.
• Some points don't count at all. Family transfers, Qantas Business Rewards, and your tier or loyalty bonuses are excluded. Only genuine earning counts.

The benefits were modest — a couple of lounge invitations a year at Points Club, and at Points Club Plus a digital Qantas Club membership plus the ability to roll over up to 100 Status Credits. Not life-changing. But it was recognition for a kind of effort the program otherwise ignores entirely.

What's closing, and when

Green Tier — the sustainability recognition programme — goes at the same time.

What replaces it — and the arithmetic problem

From 8 December you'll be able to earn Status Credits on the ground: from cards and banking, utilities, insurance, groceries, fuel, hotels, retail, food and wine, and entertainment.

On its face that sounds like an upgrade. Status Credits are the currency that actually moves you up the tiers, and until now they were flying-only. Being able to earn them from a grocery shop is a genuine structural change.

Then you see the cap.

140 is less than half of the lowest tier.

So if you never fly, the new system cannot produce status for you. Not slowly, not eventually — the maths doesn't reach. It's a top-up for people already flying, which is a reasonable thing to build, but it is not a replacement for the one part of the program that stood on its own.

Points Club could be attained by a person who never left the ground. Its replacement, by design, cannot.

The 7 December deadline

Here's the part worth acting on.

If you attain Points Club or Points Club Plus on or before 7 December 2026, you keep the benefits from the moment you unlock them until the end of your next Membership Year.

So qualifying isn't a wasted effort on a dying programme. It buys you the benefits well past the shutdown date — potentially most of another year.

Two things to check, and both live in the Qantas app:

1. Your Membership Year anniversary. The 150,000 resets on that date, not on 1 January. This is the number most people get wrong.
2. Your points earned this Membership Year. There's a Points Club progress tracker. It counts qualifying points only, so it's more reliable than doing your own sums.

Can I make it? Can you?

My own position, honestly: I don't know yet, and that's the point of this section.

What I do know is what I've earned recently. July was 104,862 points — though 88% of that was a single sign-up bonus on a travel rewards card, which is a one-off. August was 16,464, which is the honest baseline: an ordinary month of groceries, bills and two cards, with nothing special happening.

That's not a claim that I'll qualify — it depends entirely on when my Membership Year started, and those two months may straddle a reset. It's the shape of the problem, and it's probably your shape too.

The useful conclusion is this: if you have a decent points habit and a sign-up bonus anywhere in your current Membership Year, 150,000 is far closer than it sounds. Most people reading this have never checked, because there was no deadline. Now there is one.

And if you're a long way off — 40,000 points with three months to run — don't contort your spending to chase it. The benefits are two lounge invitations. Manufacturing spend to reach a programme that's closing anyway is exactly the trap I'd tell you to avoid on any other day.

The rest of the changes, briefly

For completeness, because they'll affect you eventually even if you rarely fly:

• Status Credit rollover, from 8 December 2026. Excess credits above your tier requirement carry into the next year — Silver 25% capped at 100, Gold 50% capped at 350, Platinum 50% capped at 500. Genuinely good, and overdue.
• Retention gets harder in 2027. The lower re-qualification thresholds disappear; keeping a tier will need the same credits as earning it. Silver 300, Gold 700, Platinum 1,400.
• The Loyalty Bonus retires in 2027. That's the 200 bonus Status Credits long-standing members received annually.
• Jetstar Classic Upgrades launched in September 2026, letting you use a fixed number of points for business upgrades on Jetstar.

Rollover is a real improvement. Higher retention thresholds and the loss of the Loyalty Bonus are not. On balance, if you fly regularly you're probably slightly ahead. If you don't, you've lost the only thing that was yours.

What I actually think

I want to be fair about this. Points Club was a small programme with small benefits, and Qantas is entitled to simplify. Status Credits on the ground is a more coherent idea than a separate parallel ladder, and rollover is something members have asked for for years.

But the cap tells you who it's for.

A programme that lets you earn status from your groceries, capped at less than half the entry tier, is a programme designed to reward flying with a garnish of everything else. That's a legitimate business decision. It's just not the same thing as what's being removed, and the announcements have been careful not to put those two numbers next to each other.

None of this changes what I'm doing. I'm not collecting points for status — I'm collecting them for four seats to Europe, and Classic Rewards are untouched by any of this. If you're earning on the ground to fund a trip rather than to reach a tier, this announcement costs you very little.

But it's worth checking your tracker before 7 December. It's the last time that number will mean anything.

Questions I get asked

Have you checked your Points Club tracker? I'd genuinely like to know how close people are.