Reinstating Expired American Airlines Miles

I screwed up. I let my wife’s AA miles expire due to inactivity in the account. The gist of it is that we didn’t have much use for them during the last two years of Covid, and they were forgotten about.

Allow me a quick minute to vent before I get to the reinstatement of the miles.

1. American Airlines allows miles to expire after 24 months of inactivity in the account. This was actually improved earlier this year from the previous policy of 18 months. Meanwhile, United, Delta, Southwest, and Jetblue miles have no expiration date. An expiration date only exists to limit the number of miles floating around, thereby reducing the potential cost to the airline. It’s annoying, and not customer-friendly. I especially hate that AA didn’t allow for any one-time extensions due to Covid.
2. Last year, AA also forced popular miles/points tracking website Award Wallet to stop tracking AAdvantage accounts. Another customer-unfriendly move that simply serves to eliminate the number of miles floating around.

So if people can’t track when their miles expire, and if they expire after a set period of time, then AA can significantly cut the amount of miles floating around. I can’t imagine how many expired over the last few years. I am, unfortunately, the prime example of what they tried to achieve.

American’s program changes since 2020, and everyone else’s, are logged on my points and miles devaluation timeline.

Quick Answers

Update, October 2026: is there a free way, and what does it cost now?

I wrote this in 2022. The basics have not changed, but here is where things stand today.

• The 24-month rule is still in place. Miles expire if the account has no earning or redeeming activity for 24 months.
• Two groups are exempt. Members under 21, and the primary holder of an open AAdvantage credit card. If you close the card, you get a grace period before the miles are at risk again.
• If you fly American even once a year, the simplest protection is a card that keeps the account active. My Citi AAdvantage Platinum Select and AAdvantage Globe reviews cover the current offers and whether either is worth keeping after the first year.
• There is no free way to get expired miles back. American used to have an unpublished “re-engagement challenge” where you paid a small fee and earned the miles back by flying or using partners, but member reports say it was discontinued around 2019. Today the only option American offers is paying to reactivate.
• Paid reactivation has limits. You can reactivate miles within 24 months of the date they expired, up to 500,000 miles. American’s terms currently list the fee as $60 to $2,000, depending on how many miles you bring back. It is non-refundable, and reactivated miles don’t count toward elite status.

Is it worth it? Work out the cost per mile from the quote American shows you, and compare it to what you would realistically get when you redeem. In 2022 I paid 0.7 cents per mile for 100,000 miles, well below the 1.75 to 2 cents it cost to buy miles on sale at the time, so I took it and skipped the pricier leftover miles. American doesn’t publish its price list, so the numbers below are what I was quoted in 2022. Yours may differ.

The cheapest fix is not letting them expire. Any earning or redeeming activity resets the clock: a purchase through the AAdvantage eShopping portal, a meal through AAdvantage Dining, a partner hotel stay, or a small redemption.

And if the point of keeping miles is to use them as a family, Can You Share Points and Miles? covers what American and every other program allow when it comes to pooling, transfers, and booking for someone else.

Reinstating Expired American Airlines Miles

Thankfully AA has a mechanism to restore lost miles, though at a rather significant cost. Depending on the number of miles you need to reinstate, you can pay a fee to have some or all restored to your account immediately. I decided to do just that.

We had 113,864 miles expire in this account. Here’s what AA charged to reinstate.

Let’s do a breakdown by cost per point:

• 5,000: 1.2 cents/point
• 10,000: 1 cent/point
• 15,000: 1 cent/point
• 25,000: 0.9 cents/point
• 50,000: 0.8 cents/point
• 75,000: 0.73 cents/point
• 100,000: 0.7 cents/point
• 113,864: 0.88 cents/point

You can see the cost per point went down unless I wanted all of them reinstated, which was presumably more expensive since it wasn’t in an increment of 25,000 miles.

I decided to reinstate 100,000 miles and give up the last 13,864. It was painful to give up those miles, but it was the right mathematical choice for me. Those last 13,864 miles would have cost an extra $300, or ~2.16 cents/point. That’s a lot, and usually you can buy AA miles for 1.75-2 cents/point a few times a year (if you buy the max amount of miles).

If you have to reinstate expired American Airlines miles, you might make some different choices. I decided to reinstate these miles even though I have no particular redemption in mind. If you’re planning on redeeming your lost miles and need every last mile, it will probably be worth it to buy those last few several thousand miles. Or maybe you just don’t want to buy any additional miles during a future bonus sale, so you decide it’s better to just get them all back now.

For what it’s worth, at 0.7 cents a mile I paid half of what I value AAdvantage miles at (my minimum is 1.4 cents; here are my values for every program), which is why it was an easy yes.

Summary

Look, reinstating expired miles sucks. You pay for miles you already earned or even already paid for once before. AA does it on purpose for situations exactly like the one I found myself in, and they got $700 cash out of me, plus deleted 13,864 miles from their books.

The best thing I can do now is make sure I use these 100K miles to get an extremely outsized redemption worth over 5 cents/point, like I did on my honeymoon.