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5/15/26: We’ve now reached the final weekend for points sharing between Citi ThankYou Rewards customers. If you want to share points with your partner, friend, colleague, or anyone else, do it soon. Don’t wait until Sunday night either, as Citi is notorious for making changes before midnight Eastern time.
The following notice is now present on the general ThankYou Rewards website:
We had hoped that the end of points sharing might be confined to Citi ThankYou Mastercard holders (see below). Alas, that’s not the case. If you need to transfer any points between different household members, do it before 5/17…and don’t wait until the last minute to do it. Citi is notorious for implementing changes a couple of hours early.
As a reminder, this DOES NOT affect the ability to pool points between your own cards.
~~~Original Post Follows~~~
Citi ThankYou Points might be my favorite transferable currency due to its excellent portfolio of transfer partners and appealing credit cards. However, it has a rather draconian policy for transferring points between cardholders. Each calendar year, you can send a maximum of 100,000 points to another cardholder and receive a maximum of 100,000. The catch is that those transferred points then expire 90 days after they’re moved, a bug feature that I’ve seen burn countless folks.
Unfortunately, Citi may be about to make its transfer policy even worse, as some cardholders (including me) have received the following message on their April statements:
Update to ThankYou® Rewards Point Sharing
Effective 5/17/2026, Point Sharing will no longer be offered as a ThankYou® Rewards redemption option. Additionally, you will no longer be able to receive
shared points. You can share and receive shared points until 5/16/2026.
As a reminder, shared points expire 90 days after the date they were shared.
I received that notice on the statement for my Citi ThankYou Mastercard, a peculiar product that I believe exists only for folks who were converted from another Citi card that was discontinued; mine used to be the old Sears Shop Your Way card.
The reason I mention this is that I’m not yet 100% sure the change will apply to all ThankYou Points earned from any Citi card, or just those earned from this particular one. The only data points I can find from folks who have actually received this message are from their ThankYou Mastercards, also. The points from that card are already treated differently from other ThankYou Points, in that they expire 3 years after they’re earned, whereas the points earned from other cards don’t expire so long as the card is open.
There’s no notice on the ThankYou Point website, and when I called Citi to ask about points-sharing, no one I spoke to knew anything or could find any information about it…except the rep from my ThankYou Mastercard.
That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Citi is notoriously poor at communication, and it could just be that the message is showing up on ThankYou Mastercards first. After all, American Express doesn’t allow transfers between cardholders, and Chase only permits it between cardholders within the same household. It’s not like Citi would be completely out on its own if it decided to mimic Amex.
What Now?
That said, let’s assume that Citi is really ending points transfers on 5/17. I’ve never used the feature myself, as I can’t stand the 90-day expiration policy and didn’t want to be pressured to use them within that window. That said, I’m certain many people in multiplayer households use it to transfer points so they can immediately use them for a specific award; losing that ability stinks.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t affect the ability to pool points. For instance, I have my Citi Strata Elite, Strata Premier, Double Cash, Custom Cash, and ThankYou Mastercard all on the same ThankYou points account, so they all are deposited into one pool. There is no reason to ever have to use points sharing to move points from one of your cards to another, only between cardholders.
Many people get confused by this because the ThankYou Rewards website (where you combine accounts) is notoriously fickle. Any difference in profile between two cards will keep them from being combined online. This could be an initial, an odd space in the street address or zip code, or even that one account has a phone number listed as “home” while another has it under “mobile.” You can either try to figure out what’s wrong or call the ThankYou Rewards service center, and they can process it for you. However, just to be clear, ending points sharing should have no impact on your ability to pool points between your own cards.
For folks who regularly transfer between players, it will take some household planning, similar to what folks already do with Amex. It’s worth considering whether it makes sense to have one person as the primary point-of-sale earner, with the other using either mobile payment apps or authorized user cards.
It’s also worth taking a look at what redemptions you may want to make over the next year or so, then transferring points before May 16th. Just remember to move them into the relevant loyalty programs before the 90 days are up.
Final Thoughts
It looks like points sharing between Citi cardholders is coming to an end on May 17th. This is undoubtedly a customer-unfriendly move that stinks for folks used to moving points freely between cardholders. This puts Citi’s policy in line with Amex’s, but it’s much more punitive than Chase’s and Capital One’s.
This is most likely intended as an anti-fraud measure, though that’s no comfort to folks who used it as intended. I’m surprised that Citi felt like they needed to do this, given the 100k annual limit and 90-day expiry, but here we are.
I love Citi points and never use the points sharing feature, so I won’t notice its departure. However, for folks who rely on household transfers to build a redeemable stash of points, it may be worth designating one person as the Citi “point-earner” and then focusing on Capital One and Chase in order to share points freely between players.
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UM, I spoke to Citi Thank You agent, and they told me that points from the old Sears CC don’t expire anymore. That ended 2 years ago, with the conversion to Thank You CC. I have no expiring points anymore.
Tim can you remind us again on the 16th?
Wait, what? Citi points from the new Thank You light blue card that transitioned from SYW recently have a 3 year expiration? How does that work when you earn points from different cards? Are the oldest points always used first, or the ones that expire pulled first? I earn a fair number of TY points and don’t want to lose them to to stupidity.
Not a disaster, as a friend or family member is likely to still be able to redeem an award for you that you want, and vice versa. But just about every year, my family transfers small amounts of citi points between our accounts when someone is just shy of a redemption they want. Like before they devalued, I’d regularly transfer a few thousand points to redeem the 10,000 domestic Turkish awards This kind of transfer is now no longer possible.
Just a head up to everyone: Citi is no longer allowing points sharing or pooling between cards, even on the same account. I was told that Citi Strata Elite and Citi Strata Premier are not compatible points sharing cards by Citi.
wow.. that would really suck, wtf? can anyone confirm if this is true? can’t pool points on your own acc?
I tried with 2 separate agents and escalated to a manager. The work around was to “share” points to yourself to make a booking. The change discussed in this article ends that work around. Very disappointed with Citi.
As I shared in the response above, you can still pool points among your cards by combining ThankYou accounts (just like before).
I think, over the years, some folks have been told by Citi reps who didn’t know how to combine accounts that the only way to do it was by sharing points. But, if you’ve combined your TYP accounts already, they’ll remain associated.
If you haven’t yet combined accounts, the ending of points sharing won’t affect your ability to in the future.
That’s not correct. You’re not sharing points between accounts, you want to combine ThankYou accounts.
Don’t talk to a Citi card rep. Talk to a ThankYou Rewards rep. You can also do it online as long as every piece of information on both card accounts is exactly the same.
Sounds like YMMV then. I spoke with a TY points rep, as all TY points inquiries are directed to them.
It’s really not. If you say that you want to combine TYP accounts to a TYP rep (that are in the same name) and you find a rep that can’t do it or says something like “Strata Premier and Strata Elite points aren’t compatible” hang up and call again. That’s just not correct.
2 TYPs reps and a manager told me Strata Premier and Strata Elite points were not compatible, so I don’t know what to tell you. My 2nd ticket was escalated and a call returned 2 days later with that very response.
Have you tried making sure that all Thank You account details match? My wife recently had trouble combining her ThankYou points, but she had her cell number listed as both “cell” and “home” in one Thank You account and only as “cell” (with no home number listed) in the other Thank You account. Once we edited the details to make sure they all matched perfectly, we were able to get all of her points pooled online without even needing to call (did this very recently, first between Strata Elite and Strata Premier and then between Strata pool and Double Cash). Didn’t have to call, just did it online.
You should try again, because it’s not true. My Strata Elite and Strata Premier TYP accounts are linked and points earned from each card go into the same TYP account (as you can see in the image I embeddded in this post). My wife’s accounts are linked, as are everyone else’s on the FM team, as are thousands of other Citi customers. I believe you when you say that’s what you were told, but if it were true, none of us would have been able to do it either.
Call the ThankYou Service Center directly at 1-800-THANKYOU (1-800-842-6596). Tell them that you want to combine two (or more) of your TYP accounts. Do not mention points sharing, pooling, etc. It will probably be helpful if you have your TYP account numbers (not card numbers) on hand, but they should be able to find them based on your card data.
The only way that you can’t link them is if the account holders are different, for example if one is yours and one is your spouse’s. Nick is also correct. If all of the listed data in each cared account matches completely, you can do it online. It’s just really easy to not realize that something doesn’t match, for instance, one address has a number sign before the unit and one doesn’t, or one has a cell phone listed and one doesn’t; things like that.
This might be new to those who haven’t combined their cards into one TY account previously. If the cards are still in separate TY account, you can no longer combine Custom card points with Strata Elite points. But you can combine Custom cards together or Custom with Double Cash.
Within the last two weeks, my wife combined Strata Premier + Strata Elite and then Stratas + Double Cash. This new update relates to point sharing, which is a different menu option from combining Thank You accounts. I haven’t seen anything from Citi mentioning any change to the process for combining Thank You accounts. Like I said, if you are very careful to make sure that account details match, you should be able to do it online. You do have to watch out for small differences (or perhaps even an empty space at the end of a word — like, for example, if you swyped your address on mobile, it is probably possible that it automatically inserted a blank space after the last word that needs to be deleted or something small that would easily go unnoticed).
If I transfer points from P2 to me can I then transfer those to my AA without losing my TYPs?
I have one of those old Sear Thank You Points CCs. I think they changed the expiration of points about 2 year ago. None of my points have an expiration date, now. Citi did some kind of pooling thing where all my points are together, with no expiration dates. I called Citi about this and they told me none of points expire now. Granted, I have many TYP earning cards. Premier, DoubleCash, 2 Custom Cash, the old Sears CC, Costco, and a Best Buy CC.
Has this been confirmed on any other cards? Points sharing is not available on Custom Cash right now, so maybe ThankYou Mastercard is getting the same treatment, while all other cards stay as-is.
Can you transfer to the airline or hotel account of an Authorized User? That would make “points sharing” pretty easy.
But now both need to pay an annual fee to get decent transfer rates
It’s confirmed for all TYP cards. That’s been posted around the internet already in multiple places already today.
Is this actually confirmed? They haven’t given me any notice