Southwest Companion Pass Rules Changed: The Complete 2027 Guide

On October 15, 2026, Southwest rewrote the Companion Pass rules — and the credit-card path that made it famous is being switched off. From January 1, 2027, the Companion Pass is no longer something you earn with 135,000 qualifying points. It becomes a benefit of the airline's new top elite tier, and welcome bonuses, referral bonuses, anniversary points, category-bonus points and partner spend stop counting toward it entirely. You have until December 31, 2026 to earn one under the old rules — and until December 2, 2026 to apply for a card whose bonus still counts.

Quick answer

Through December 31, 2026, nothing has changed: 135,000 Companion Pass–qualifying points (or 100 qualifying one-way flights) in a calendar year still earns the pass, and credit card welcome bonuses still count in full. A pass earned in 2026 gives you unlimited companion trips through December 31, 2027.

From January 1, 2027, the 135,000-point path disappears. Instead:

• 95,000 Tier Qualifying Points (TQPs) or 75 qualifying one-way flights earns a Milestone Reward of three Companion Pass trips — three one-time uses, not a pass
• 140,000 TQPs or 100 qualifying one-way flights earns the new Platinum tier, which carries unlimited Companion Pass trips
• Southwest credit cards earn 1 TQP per $1 spent — but welcome bonuses, referral bonuses, anniversary points, bonus-category points and partner spend earn zero TQPs

Key takeaway: 2026 is the last year a credit card welcome bonus can buy you a Companion Pass. After that, only flight spend and ordinary card spend count, at a much higher threshold.

What changed, exactly

The 135,000-point race is over

Until now the Companion Pass was the one elite-grade perk in US loyalty that a non-flyer could earn from an armchair: open a Southwest card, hit the minimum spend, collect a welcome bonus worth half the threshold, and finish the rest with groceries. That pathway existed because Companion Pass–qualifying points counted every Rapid Rewards point you earned, no matter where it came from.

From January 1, 2027 that standalone qualification disappears. The Companion Pass is folded into the elite tier structure and earned with Tier Qualifying Points, a separate currency that only counts a narrow set of activity.

What stops counting toward the Companion Pass

Starting January 1, 2027, none of the following earn TQPs — and therefore none of them move you toward a Companion Pass:

• New Cardmember welcome bonuses (the single biggest change)
• Referral bonuses for referring friends to a Southwest card
• Card anniversary points, including the 10,000-point anniversary bonus
• Bonus-category points — the extra points from a 2x or 3x multiplier; only the base $1 = 1 TQP counts
• Partner earning — hotel and car bookings, the Rapid Rewards Shopping portal, and Southwest Dining

Balance transfers, cash advances, cash-like transactions, person-to-person transfers, interest and fees have never counted as purchases and still do not.

How you earn TQPs instead

TQPs come from a short list:

• Revenue flights operated by Southwest, earned at the fare's own rate — Basic 2x, Choice 6x, Choice Preferred 8x, Choice Extra 10x
• Southwest credit card spend — 1 TQP per $1 on eligible purchases, for every cardmember including the entry-level Southwest Plus
• Rapid Rewards debit card purchases
• Getaways by Southwest and Southwest Groups bookings
• TQP bonus promotions and Buy TQP promotions, when Southwest runs them

Note the fare-earning cut buried in the same announcement: Choice Extra drops from 14x to 10x, a 28.6% reduction, so buying up to premium fares to chase status also got meaningfully more expensive.

The new tier ladder

A-List becomes Silver and A-List Preferred becomes Gold, with Platinum added above both.

Milestone Rewards — the new three-trip middle ground

Southwest also added Milestone Rewards, which pay out on the way up the ladder rather than at a tier:

Three Companion Pass trips is not a Companion Pass. It is three one-time uses, and then it is gone. The unlimited version only comes with Platinum.

The cardmember 10,000-TQP boost

There is one concession for cardholders. From January 1 through December 31, 2027, a primary Rapid Rewards Cardmember who reaches 130,000 TQPs receives a one-time 10,000-TQP boost, deposited within 30 days, counting toward 2027 qualification and carrying through 2028. One boost per cardmember per year, card must be open and in good standing.

In practice this means a cardholder reaches Platinum at 130,000 TQPs rather than 140,000 — useful, but it does not change the shape of the problem.

Key takeaway: the Companion Pass is now an elite benefit priced in flight activity and base card spend. Welcome bonuses — the entire reason the pass was reachable for non-flyers — contribute nothing.

Old vs. new, side by side

The honest math: what Platinum actually costs

Under the old rules, a two-card household could plausibly clear 135,000 points with two welcome bonuses and a few months of groceries — call it $10,000–$15,000 of spend plus two annual fees.

Under the new rules, if you do not fly Southwest much, the only lever is base card spend at 1 TQP per $1:

If you do fly Southwest, the picture is much better, because flights earn at the fare multiplier: roughly $23,000 of Choice fares (6x) reaches 140,000 TQPs, and Choice Extra at 10x gets there on about $14,000 of flying. That is the point of the redesign — it moves the pass from card-spend people to frequent flyers.

⚠️ Biggest mistake — Assuming you can "just put spend on the card" in 2027 the way you did in 2026. The number is not 135,000 points any more, it is 140,000 TQPs, and a welcome bonus contributes zero of them. For a household spending $30,000 a year on cards, the card-only path to unlimited Companion Pass is now roughly a four-year project.

Key takeaway: for frequent Southwest flyers the pass got reachable at around $14,000–$23,000 of annual flying; for everyone else it went from a one-year card project to effectively out of reach.

What to do — by situation

You already earned a Companion Pass in 2026

Do nothing, and plan your trips. Southwest confirmed that a pass earned in 2026 keeps unlimited Companion Pass trips through December 31, 2027 under the old terms. You have a full extra year. Use it: book the companion onto everything, and treat December 2027 as a hard expiry rather than a renewal date, because requalifying under the new rules is a completely different exercise.

You are close to 135,000 points right now, in 2026

Finish it before December 31, 2026. This is the single highest-value action available to anyone reading this. Points still count the old way for the rest of this calendar year, and a pass earned even on December 30 runs through all of 2027. The usual "January beats December" timing advice is reversed this one time — the old rules are not available in January, so an expensive December push that would normally be a mistake is now correct.

Remember that points count on the date they post to your Rapid Rewards account, not the date you spend. A late-December statement that closes in January will land in the wrong year. Work backwards from your statement close date, not from December 31.

You have not started, and it is still 2026

Your deadline is December 2, 2026, not December 31. Southwest stated that Cardmembers approved for a Rapid Rewards card on or before December 2, 2026 who then meet the welcome-bonus requirements will have those points count as Companion Pass–qualifying points even if the spend threshold is met in early 2027. That is an unusually generous transition rule, and it is the last door open.

Practically: apply by December 2, stack a personal card with a business card if you qualify for both — SW Priority, Southwest Premier, Southwest Plus on the personal side, Southwest Premier Business and Southwest Performance Business on the business side — and let two welcome bonuses do most of the 135,000. Check the live offers before you apply; see Southwest card vs. Chase UR for Southwest if you are deciding between the co-brands, and the Chase 5/24 rule before you add two Chase cards at once.

💡 Pro tip — Approval date is what matters for the December 2 deadline, not application date. If you are applying close to the line, apply early enough to clear a pending-review decision, and call reconsideration rather than waiting.

You were planning to earn it in 2027 with credit cards

That plan is dead — rebuild it now. There is no version of the 2027 rules where a welcome bonus moves you toward a Companion Pass. Your options are to pull the plan forward into 2026 (see above), to accept the 95,000-TQP three-trip milestone if you fly enough, or to stop optimizing for Southwest and move the spend somewhere it still pays. If the companion benefit was the whole thesis, Alaska's Companion Fare is the closest surviving card-earned equivalent, and transferable points with a flexible redemption path are the general-purpose answer.

You fly Southwest regularly for work

You are the person this redesign was built for — do the arithmetic on your actual flying. Add up last year's Southwest flight spend and multiply by your usual fare's rate (Choice 6x, Choice Preferred 8x, Choice Extra 10x). If that number plus your card spend lands anywhere near 95,000, the three-trip milestone is close to free. If it clears 130,000 with the cardmember boost, Platinum and unlimited companion travel is genuinely easier than the old 135,000-point grind ever was for you.

You hold A-List or A-List Preferred

Your status converts automatically. A-List becomes Silver on January 1, 2027 and your earning bonus goes up, from 25% to 40%. A-List Preferred becomes Gold, and here there is a protection worth knowing: you keep the 100% flight-points earning bonus through December 31, 2027, after which Gold's rate drops to 60%. Silver members also keep a $35 second checked bag through December 31, 2027. Nothing to do, but note that Gold sits below the Companion Pass line — the perk you may have been requalifying for is now two tiers up.

You hold Southwest cards only for the Companion Pass

Re-underwrite each annual fee before it next posts. With the welcome bonus and anniversary points no longer counting, the cards' contribution to a Companion Pass is now just 1 TQP per dollar — $229 a year on SW Priority buys you status progress at the same rate as a free card would, if a free card earned TQPs. What the cards still deliver: the anniversary points themselves (worth real money even if they do not count for status), free checked bags, and the TQP earning that genuinely helps if you are already flying. What they no longer deliver: a shortcut to a companion. Our year-end wallet audit walks the cancel-vs-downgrade decision.

Key takeaway: there are only two time-sensitive actions — finish a 2026 pass before December 31, and apply for any card you want counted by December 2. Everything else is a recalculation, not a race.

The deadline calendar

Biggest mistakes to avoid in the transition

1. Treating December 2 and December 31 as the same deadline. They are two different gates — card approval and points posting — and missing the first one costs you the entire welcome-bonus path.
2. Waiting for January so the pass "lasts two years." That advice was correct for a decade and is wrong now. January 2027 has no 135,000-point path at all.
3. Counting a bonus that posts in January 2027 without having been approved by December 2. Without the approval date, those points are ordinary Rapid Rewards points and do nothing for a pass.
4. Confusing three Companion Pass trips with a Companion Pass. The 95,000-TQP milestone is three uses; only Platinum is unlimited.
5. Cancelling Southwest cards in a hurry. The anniversary points still arrive and still have cash value — they just stopped counting toward status. Decide on the full economics, not on the one benefit that changed.