UK rewards card points value 2026: what a point is really worth

Referral Plug earns a commission on some of the links below. Two of the seven cards here are ones we refer to: the British Airways American Express Credit Card and Yonder, both of which I have held and one of which is in my wallet now. The other five pay us nothing, including the American Express Nectar Credit Card, which tops the table. Nobody paid to be ranked, and the card that comes first is one we earn no commission on.

The headline finding: the multiplier printed on the front of a UK rewards card tells you almost nothing about what the card pays. Yonder Full earns 5 points per £1, the highest rate of the seven cards here, and guarantees 0.5p back for every £1 spent. The American Express Nectar Credit Card earns 2 points per £1 and guarantees 1p, double the return on 40% of the headline number. That happens because the six point currencies behind these cards are not worth the same amount: a Tesco Clubcard point is guaranteed at 1p and a Yonder point at 0.1p, a spread of ten to one, and it runs almost exactly opposite to the earn rates. Multiply the two together and the ranking inverts. Every rate below is read from the programme's own published terms, and the arithmetic, the sources and the limits are all here.

Most "best rewards credit card" lists compare earn rates and stop, which is like comparing salaries in different currencies without an exchange rate. The rate is the missing half of the sum, and every programme in this study publishes one somewhere.

How we built this table

The method is the same one we used for the energy refer-a-friend league table and the voucher code reliability study: go to the primary source and read it.

• What counts as a rate here. A fixed conversion the programme publishes itself, in the form "X points = £Y", that any member can take without hunting for availability. Tesco's "250 Clubcard points gives you £2.50 in vouchers" qualifies. A business-class seat that happens to price well in Avios does not, because it is a market price on one route on one date, not a rate.
• The floor, not the best case. Where a programme publishes several rates, the table leads with the lowest one that is always available, then names the highest published route separately. That ordering is deliberate: the floor is the number you can count on, and it is the one that never appears in the marketing.
• Scope. UK consumer credit cards that earn a loyalty point rather than cash. Cashback cards are excluded, because a penny of cashback is worth a penny and there is nothing to measure. Yonder appears twice because Free and Full earn at different rates, and only Full can cash points out.
• Normalising. Each per-point rate is multiplied by the card's own published earn rate on ordinary, non-category spending, giving guaranteed pence returned per £1. That is the only figure in the study that lets a 5-points-per-£1 card and a 1-point-per-£10 card be read against each other.
• What is not in it. Annual fees, welcome bonuses, lounge access and travel insurance are all out of scope. This measures what a point is worth and what a pound of spending earns, before anything is deducted or added. Where a fee changes the reading, and on Yonder Full and Amex Gold it does, the fee is named in the prose.

Limitations, stated plainly. Three of them matter. First, this is a snapshot of published terms in August 2026, and these rates move: British Airways has already announced that the Premium Plus card's earn rate drops from 1.5 to 1.25 Avios per £1 on 7 October 2026, though the fee-free Classic card in this table is unaffected. Second, the 0.5p we use for Avios is a floor derived from two published conversions rather than a rate Avios prints anywhere, and it is half the 1p Head for Points benchmark our Amex and Yonder pages use for fee-adjusted comparisons. Both are defensible: one measures what an Avios is guaranteed to fetch, the other what a redeemed Avios typically fetches, and we have not restated either page's arithmetic here. Third, Virgin Atlantic's Reward cards are absent because Virgin Red's reward catalogue would not load for us logged out, so no Virgin Points rate could be read from a primary source. We would rather leave a card out than price it from someone else's estimate.

What is one point actually worth?

Ranked by guaranteed value per point, highest first. Every figure links to the page it was read from.

Two programmes advertise a rate well above their own floor, and the multiple between the two columns is the most useful thing on this page. Yonder's ceiling is twenty-five times its floor. Tesco's is exactly twice. Amex advertises no multiple at all, and the best route its own pages publish is worth 1.1 times its default. John Lewis and Nectar have no gap at all: a point is 1p and 0.5p respectively, in every direction, which makes them the only two currencies here that a reader can price without reading anything else.

Avios is the odd one out. There is no published pence figure for an Avios anywhere on British Airways' or Avios's own pages, because the programme's main use is reward flights, which are priced per route rather than per point. The 0.5p in the table is not a rate Avios advertises; it is what falls out of the cash-out conversion and Nectar's own 500-points-for-£2.50 rate, and it is available to anyone who links the two accounts. The two directions are not symmetrical and this is where the number usually goes wrong: Avios's retailer page publishes the collecting direction, 400 Nectar points for 250 Avios, which is a different rate and not a floor. Cashing out runs the other way, and it is also a rate Avios has cut, from 0.67p to 0.5p on 11 March 2024 when it moved to 400 Avios for 400 Nectar points. Redeem on a long-haul premium cabin and you can beat it comfortably. The point of a floor is that you do not have to.

What a pound of spending is guaranteed to earn

This is the table the rest of the study exists for. Each card's published earn rate on ordinary spending, multiplied by the floor value of the point it collects. Ranked highest first.

Earn rates across these cards span fifty to one, from Yonder Full's 5 points per £1 down to the John Lewis card's 1 point per £10. Point values span ten to one in the opposite direction. What actually lands spans ten to one again, and in a different order from either column that produced it.

The highest earn rate is not the highest return

Yonder Full ties for second on guaranteed return while holding the biggest earn rate in the table. The Amex Nectar card sits first on an earn rate two and a half times smaller. Two fee-free cards, the BA Amex Classic and Yonder Free, share an identical 1-point-per-£1 earn rate and sit joint second and last: an Avios is guaranteed at 0.5p, while the only rate Yonder guarantees is the 0.1p cash-out and section 4(b) restricts that to Full members, so a Yonder Free point has no published floor at all. Amex Gold makes up the third of that 0.5p tie on a card costing £195 a year from year two, where the Classic costs nothing.

None of this is a trick played on anybody. Yonder attaches a 0.1p cash-out floor to a point that its catalogue has returned 3.4 times more on across my own redemptions, and prices the card accordingly; Nectar attaches 0.5p to a point you spend at a till and nothing else. Both are coherent designs. What does not survive is the habit of quoting points per pound as though it were a rate of return. On this table it is not even correlated with one.

The practical test takes ten seconds and works on any rewards card, including ones not listed here. Find the programme's fixed-value redemption, the "X points = £Y" line buried in its help pages, divide to get pence per point, then multiply by the card's earn rate. If the answer is under 1p per £1, a fee-free 1% cashback card is paying you more for the same spending, with nothing to redeem and nothing to remember.

The Amex transfer route no longer beats a gift card

American Express prices a Membership Rewards point at 0.45p when you use it the obvious way: 1,000 points takes £4.50 off your balance, or buys £4.50 at Amazon, or pays £4.50 through PayPal. Gift cards pay 1,000 points for £5, which is 0.5p a point.

Amex also publishes, on its own transfer page, that 1 Membership Rewards point becomes 1 Avios, with a minimum transfer of 1,000 points in increments of 500. Avios converts 400 Avios into 400 Nectar points. Nectar publishes that 500 points are worth £2.50 at Sainsbury's. Follow those three published rates end to end and a Membership Rewards point is worth 0.5p of groceries: 11% more than statement credit, and exactly what the gift card already pays.

That route was worth taking until 11 March 2024, when Avios cut the conversion from 300 Avios per 400 Nectar points to 400 for 400 and the routed value fell from 0.67p to 0.5p. What survives is three transfers, a British Airways Club account, a linked Nectar account, a 1,000-point minimum and a conversion capped at 25,200 Avios a quarter (opens in new tab), for a rate one click on a gift card gives you. It is the clearest example on this page of a devaluation that left every earn rate untouched.

The two store cards are really two cards each

Tesco's and John Lewis's cards look mediocre on the table above because that table measures ordinary spending. In their own shops they are transformed, and the two of them carry the widest in-store gaps in the set.

Tesco's 2.5p per £1 at a Reward Partner is the highest per-pound rate in this entire study, and it is open to anyone with a Clubcard. Yonder's 2.5p is the same number in a different unit, per point rather than per pound, and marketed rather than committed to. Tesco's is also the narrowest: it exists only on Tesco spending, redeemed with one of the partners Tesco lists. A card that pays 2.5p on your groceries and 0.125p on everything else is a supermarket loyalty scheme with a credit line attached, and reading it as a rewards card is how people end up putting their whole month through the wrong plastic.

The Amex Nectar card is the interesting one in that table precisely because its gap is small. It pays 1p per £1 everywhere and 1.5p at Sainsbury's, which is the flattest profile of the seven cards and the reason it tops the main ranking.

Where Yonder actually lands

Joint second on the guaranteed table, at 0.5p per £1, level with the BA Amex Classic and Amex Gold and behind only the Amex Nectar card. That is the honest reading of the floor, and I hold the card, so it is worth saying why I still do.

Yonder's 0.1p is unlike every other floor here. A Nectar point is 0.5p at a Sainsbury's till whether you think about it or not, and a Clubcard point is 1p at Tesco the same way; those are the rates people actually get. Yonder's 0.1p is a cash-out route that Full members can use and that nobody sensible does. The rate that describes a real Yonder redemption is the one I have measured from my own account: 0.339p per point across four redemptions totalling 71,170 points for £241.00 of rewards, which puts Yonder Full at 1.695p per £1. That is the highest per-pound figure in the study, roughly 70% above the Amex Nectar card's guaranteed 1p and 3.4 times the BA Amex's 0.5p.

It is also the only figure in the study that is not a published floor, and it should be read differently for three reasons. It comes from one person's four redemptions, not from a term sheet. It is entirely physical goods, so it says nothing about the dining Experiences Yonder attaches its 2.5p ceiling to. And Full costs £15 a month, which the 1.695p has to clear before it beats a card that costs nothing: the Full versus Free breakeven and the Yonder-versus-Amex arithmetic are worked through separately, because they turn on fees rather than on point values, and the full redemption ledger is in what a Yonder point is really worth.

What a floor rate never captures

Every number above assumes the point gets redeemed, and that the rate behind it holds. Four things sit between the table and what actually reaches you.

Points can be forfeited entirely. Yonder's Rewards Terms section 7(a) says you lose every point you have earned if either side closes the account. Points that survive indefinitely inside a live account are worth nothing the day it shuts.

Redemption is work, and unspent points are worth 0p. It took me eight months to redeem 71,170 Yonder points, and 51,720 of them went in a single transaction after months of meaning to get to it. A cashback card pays whether you remember it exists.

Conversion routes have caps and minimums. Amex will not transfer fewer than 1,000 points to Avios, Avios and Nectar convert in blocks of 400, and the automatic Avios-to-Nectar route stops at 25,200 Avios a quarter. Small balances are stranded at the default rate.

The two halves of the sum move independently. British Airways has published that its Premium Plus card drops from 1.5 to 1.25 Avios per £1 on 7 October 2026, a cut to the earn side that leaves every rate in this table untouched. A cut to a conversion ratio does the reverse, and Avios made one on 11 March 2024: moving the Nectar conversion from 300 Avios per 400 points to 400 for 400 took 25% off what every Avios-earning card in this table guarantees, without changing a single earn rate. Only the product of the two describes a card, and a table tracking either column alone would miss half the devaluations.

Cite this study

This is original research, read from each programme's own published terms in August 2026, and you are welcome to cite or link to it with attribution. A ready-to-use line:

A 2026 Referral Plug study priced six UK rewards currencies from their own published redemptions and found guaranteed values ranging from 1p per point (Tesco Clubcard, John Lewis) down to 0.1p (Yonder). Normalised to pence returned per £1 of ordinary card spending, the American Express Nectar Credit Card led at 1p per £1 on an earn rate of 2 points per £1, ahead of Yonder Full at 0.5p per £1 despite Yonder Full carrying the highest headline earn rate in the study at 5 points per £1.

Full citation: Seb Place, "UK rewards card points value 2026: what a point is really worth", Referral Plug, August 2026. https://www.referralplug.co.uk/blog/uk-rewards-card-points-value (opens in new tab)

The method sits under "How we built this table" above, and our wider testing methodology explains how we verify the schemes we link to.

Where Referral Plug fits

We are not a card comparison site, and this table is partly here to say so: for representative APRs, eligibility checks and balance transfers, MoneySavingExpert or a broker is where to start. What we cover is the referral layer on top. Of the seven cards here, two are ones we refer to and one of those is in my wallet: the British Airways Amex referral link pays 6,000 bonus Avios against the 5,000 Amex gives for applying direct, worth £30 against £25 at the 0.5p floor in the table above, and the Yonder referral offer adds a second fee-free month on Full. If you want the card-versus-card version of this comparison rather than the currency-versus-currency one, it is in Yonder vs Amex Gold, and the route-by-route ranking for Yonder points specifically is in how to redeem Yonder points.

Rewards card points value FAQs

Which UK rewards credit card points are worth the most?

Per point, Tesco Clubcard points and John Lewis points, both guaranteed at 1p: 250 Clubcard points gives £2.50 in vouchers and 500 John Lewis points becomes a £5 voucher. Avios and Nectar points follow at 0.5p, Amex Membership Rewards at 0.45p and Yonder points at 0.1p. Per point is the wrong question for choosing a card, though, because the cards paying the most valuable points also hand out the fewest of them. On guaranteed return per £1 spent, the American Express Nectar Credit Card leads at 1p, and the John Lewis card pays 0.1p on ordinary spending despite its point being ten times more valuable than Yonder's.

How much is a credit card point worth in the UK?

Between 0.1p and 1p, depending entirely on the programme, and every one of those rates is published by the programme itself rather than estimated. The useful figure is not the point value but the point value multiplied by the earn rate. Across the six cards in this study that publish a floor, that comes out between 0.1p and 1p per £1 of ordinary spending, so the best guaranteed rewards card here matches a 1% cashback card and the worst pays a tenth of one. The seventh, Yonder Free, guarantees nothing at all, because Yonder's 0.1p cash-out is Full members only.

Are Avios worth more than Amex Membership Rewards points?

Barely, at the guaranteed floor: 0.5p against 0.45p. The two are connected rather than in competition, because Amex publishes a 1:1 transfer from Membership Rewards to Avios, so any Membership Rewards point can become an Avios worth 0.5p. That is also what an Amex gift card pays, so the transfer no longer buys anything a simpler redemption does not, and the 0.45p statement credit rate Amex's own page presents first stays the worst of the three.

Is a card earning 5 points per £1 better than one earning 2 points per £1?

Not necessarily, and in this study it is not. Yonder Full earns 5 points per £1 at a guaranteed 0.1p each, giving 0.5p per £1. The American Express Nectar Credit Card earns 2 points per £1 at a guaranteed 0.5p each, giving 1p per £1, twice as much. Points per pound is only half a calculation: it tells you how many units you get, not what a unit is worth. Multiply the two before comparing any two rewards cards.

What is the best value way to use Amex Membership Rewards points in the UK?

Gift cards, at 1,000 points for £5, or 0.5p a point. Statement credit, Amazon and PayPal all pay 0.45p. Transferring to Avios at 1:1 and then converting 400 Avios to 400 Nectar points lands on the same 0.5p, but needs a linked British Airways Club account and a Nectar account, has a 1,000-point minimum and caps at 25,200 Avios a quarter, so it buys nothing the gift card does not. Redeeming Avios on a premium-cabin reward flight can beat 0.5p comfortably, but that depends on route, date and availability rather than on a published rate.

Do Tesco Clubcard and John Lewis points beat airline points?

Per point, yes: both are guaranteed at 1p, against 0.5p for an Avios. Per pound spent, no, and it is not close. The Tesco Bank Clubcard Credit Card earns 1 point per £8 outside Tesco and the John Lewis Partnership Card 1 point per £10 elsewhere, so ordinary spending returns 0.125p and 0.1p per £1 against the BA Amex Classic's 0.5p. Both store cards flip inside their own shops, where they pay 1.25p per £1, rising to 2.5p if a Tesco voucher is doubled with a Reward Partner. Match the card to where the money goes.

Why do rewards card reviews give such different point values?

Because most programmes publish more than one rate and reviewers pick different ones. Yonder alone publishes a 0.1p contractual floor, a 0.16p flight rate and an "up to 2.5p" marketing ceiling, a spread of twenty-five to one. Reviews also mix units without labelling them: "5 points per £1" and "0.5% back" can describe the same card. This study uses one unit throughout, pence per point, and one basis, the lowest rate the programme publishes and always honours.

Sources

• Tesco: value of Clubcard points (opens in new tab): "Every 250 Clubcard points you collect will give you £2.50 in Clubcard vouchers"
• Tesco: using Clubcard vouchers with Reward Partners (opens in new tab): "You can get 2x your Clubcard voucher value to use with 100+ Reward Partners"
• Tesco Bank: Clubcard Credit Card rewards (opens in new tab): 5 points per £4 at Tesco, 1 point per £8 anywhere else
• John Lewis Money: how to spend your Partnership Credit Card points (opens in new tab): "For every 500 points you collect, we'll send you a £5 voucher"; five points per £4 at John Lewis and Waitrose, one point per £10 elsewhere
• Nectar: Sainsbury's (opens in new tab): "500 points are worth £2.50"
• Avios: Nectar (opens in new tab): "250 Avios / 400 Nectar points", which is the collecting direction, 400 Nectar points buying 250 Avios. It is not the cash-out rate, and reading it as one overstates the floor by 60%
• Head for Points: how do you convert Avios points into Nectar points? (opens in new tab) (1 February 2026): 400 Avios to 400 Nectar points and 400 Nectar points to 250 Avios, the rates Avios set on 11 March 2024, down from 300 Avios per 400 Nectar points
• Avios: automatic conversion limits (opens in new tab): 25,200 Avios per quarter to Nectar, 40,000 Nectar points per quarter to Avios
• American Express: Membership Rewards (opens in new tab): 1,000 points = £4.50 for statement credit, Amazon, PayPal and travel; 1,000 points = £5 for gift cards
• American Express: transferring Membership Rewards to the British Airways Club (opens in new tab): "1 Membership Rewards point = 1 Avios", minimum 1,000 points in increments of 500
• American Express Nectar Credit Card (opens in new tab): 2 Nectar points per £1, and a minimum of 3 points per £1 at Nectar partners when the card and loyalty card are used together
• British Airways American Express Credit Card (opens in new tab): 1 Avios per £1, no annual fee, 5,000 bonus Avios on £2,000 of spending in three months
• American Express Preferred Rewards Gold (opens in new tab): 1 point per £1 on purchases, and a £195 annual fee waived in the first year
• British Airways: Amex credit cards (opens in new tab): the Premium Plus earn rate change from 1.5 to 1.25 Avios per £1 on 7 October 2026
• Yonder Rewards Terms and Conditions (UK) 2.2 (opens in new tab): section 4(b), "100,000 Points is worth £100" and the Free-member cash-out exclusion; section 7(a), points lost on account closure
• Yonder Rewards (opens in new tab): the "up to 2.5p towards an Experience" claim
• Yonder Full (opens in new tab) and Yonder Free (opens in new tab): 5 points per £1 at £15 a month, and 1 point per £1 at no cost
• My own Yonder Full account: four redemptions between December 2025 and August 2026 totalling 71,170 points for £241.00 of rewards, a blended 0.339p per point