Do Amazon points expire?

points don't expire as long as your card account remains open (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11).

That is a strong promise with one string attached, and it is worth reading the string carefully. The protection is not “points never expire”. It is “points do not expire as long as your card account remains open”. Remove the account and you remove the protection.

What Chase does not attach: no expiry window, no minimum activity requirement, no annual reset, and no minimum balance. A balance sitting untouched for two years on an open account is in the same position as one earned yesterday.

The practical effect is that this is one of the few things about a credit card you can simply stop thinking about. There is no date to diarize.

If you take one thing from this page: redeem before you close.

An unredeemed balance on a closing account is real money with no recovery route. Points are worth 100 points = $1 (each $1 in % back rewards earned is equal to 100 points) (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11), so 8,000 points left behind is $80 thrown away for no reason at all.

The good news is that spending them is trivial, because there is no optimization to do. Chase lists the routes as eligible purchases at Amazon.com checkout, cash back, travel and gift cards (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11), and every one pays the same fixed cent. Take whichever is fastest and move on.

This is step one on our closure checklist for exactly this reason. Everything else about closing a card is recoverable or negotiable; this part is not.

One related nuance: closed and inactive are different states. Chase’s condition is an open account, not an active one. But an account you never use is an account you are more likely to close on a tidying impulse — and on a card with $0 (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11) annual fee, there is rarely a good financial reason to.

Expiry is one risk to a rewards balance. Devaluation is the other, and it is the one that actually costs people money in the wider points world.

A transferable points currency has a value that depends on what the issuer’s partners will accept. When those terms change — a chart adjusts, a partner leaves — a balance someone spent two years building is worth less on a Tuesday than it was on a Monday. The points did not expire. They shrank.

Amazon points cannot do this. Chase fixes the rate: 100 points = $1 (each $1 in % back rewards earned is equal to 100 points) (Chase — Prime Visa, verified 2026-08-11). There is no chart, no partner, and no redemption route that pays a different amount. A fixed cent has nowhere to fall.

That is the compensation for the thing people complain about with this program — that you can never do better than a cent. You also cannot do worse, and over a multi-year balance that is a real advantage. We make the full argument on what Amazon points are worth.

The first three rows say functionally the same thing in three sets of words, all tying the protection to the account staying open. That is the industry norm on cash-back-style programs rather than a distinctive feature of this one.

The last row is the honest gap. Synchrony’s own site did not respond to us and Amazon’s help pages refuse automated requests, so we could not source an expiry policy for the Amazon Store Card’s rewards. Rather than assume it matches the Chase cards, we are telling you we do not know. If you hold the store card, treat the balance as worth spending rather than storing, and check the terms Synchrony gives you. How store card rewards work covers what we could establish.

With no expiry, no devaluation risk and no published minimum for cash back, the honest answer is that timing does not matter. There is no strategy here, and any page that invents one is inventing it.

The only nudge worth giving is inflationary rather than programmatic: a fixed cent today buys marginally more than a fixed cent in three years. That is a small argument for spending a balance rather than accumulating one, and it is not a reason to redeem badly.

The larger practical argument is the one at the top of this page. Balances get forgotten, accounts get closed, and the two combine badly. Spending your points a few times a year keeps the balance small enough that no closure ever costs you much.