The Best Ways to Redeem Chase Points in 2026

For years the advice for Chase Ultimate Rewards points was almost boringly simple: if you held a Sapphire card, you could book travel through Chase's portal at a flat 1.5 or 1.25 cents per point with zero effort. In June 2025 Chase rewrote that rule. The flat portal rate is gone, replaced by a system called Points Boost, and the change reshuffled the entire value hierarchy. This guide lays out that hierarchy from best to worst, using only Chase-confirmed figures, and it is honest that the "just book through the portal" path is meaningfully less rewarding than it was a year ago.

What Points Boost actually changed

Start here, because everything downstream depends on it.

As of July 2026, Chase no longer offers a flat cents-per-point rate for booking travel through the Chase Travel portal. That flat rate — long the reason the Sapphire cards were so easy to recommend — was retired when Chase announced its refreshed lineup in its June 23, 2025 press release, "The Most Rewarding Cards Are Here." In its place is Points Boost, and the mechanics are worth understanding precisely.

Under Points Boost, Chase flags a rotating set of "select" top hotels and flights that redeem at an elevated value; everything outside that flagged inventory redeems at a 1-cent-per-point baseline. The portal now has two speeds: a boosted lane for specific properties and routes, and a plain 1-cent lane for everything else.

The exact boost depends on the card (all figures as of July 2026 — confirm on Chase's own page before you rely on them):

• Chase Sapphire Reserve — Points Boost of up to 2x, meaning up to 2 cents per point, on select top hotels and flights, including "The Edit" hotels and select airlines. The non-boosted baseline is 1 cent per point, down from the old flat 1.5 cents.
• Chase Sapphire Preferred — Points Boost of up to 1.5x, meaning up to 1.5 cents per point, on select top hotels and flights. The non-boosted baseline is 1 cent per point, down from the old flat 1.25 cents.
• Ink Business Preferred — industry sources report it behaves comparably to the Sapphire Preferred, roughly up to 1.5x boosted with a 1-cent baseline. Treat this as industry-reported, not issuer-confirmed, and verify it against your own account.

The honest read: for the everyday portal booking that is not on the boosted list, both flagship Sapphire cards now return 1 cent per point — a real cut from the flat rates that made them famous. The upside only materializes when your travel happens to match Chase's boosted inventory.

The grandfather clause many Reserve holders still have

If you have held a Sapphire Reserve for a while, read this before you assume the worst.

Chase confirmed a grandfather clause alongside the change. Sapphire Reserve cardmembers who applied before June 23, 2025 can still redeem points they earned before October 26, 2025 at the legacy 1.5 cents per point, and that window runs through October 26, 2027 (as of July 2026). In practice, that means a longtime Reserve holder with a stockpile of pre-cutoff points still has a roughly year-and-a-half runway to spend those specific points at the old, better portal rate — even as newly earned points fall under the Points Boost baseline.

It is a narrow but genuinely valuable carve-out. If you qualify, those grandfathered points are worth treating as a distinct bucket and spending on portal travel before the October 2027 deadline, rather than letting them lapse into the 1-cent world.

The redemption hierarchy, best to worst

Here is the spine of the whole guide: four ways to spend Chase points, ranked by the value they tend to return, with the effort each demands.

1. Transfer to a travel partner for an outsized award

This is the highest ceiling and the most work. Chase transfers Ultimate Rewards points 1:1 to a lineup of airline and hotel programs — including World of Hyatt, Air France/KLM Flying Blue, Virgin Atlantic, Air Canada Aeroplan, British Airways and Iberia Avios, United, Southwest, Singapore, JetBlue, and Aer Lingus, plus hotel partners Hyatt, IHG, Marriott, and Wyndham. The single best-value plays usually come from transferring to a partner and booking an award — World of Hyatt is the perennial standout because Hyatt's award chart can turn a modest number of points into a premium hotel night.

The catch is real: transfers are final. Once points leave Chase for a partner they cannot come back, so the discipline is always to confirm the exact award is bookable — the flight, the date, the room — before you transfer a single point. Because award value swings so widely by program, route, and season, it cannot be reduced to one fixed cents-per-point number. Done right, though, this is where the standout redemptions live. Our companion guide to Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners walks through the lineup in detail.

2. Points Boost in the Chase Travel portal

The middle path: decent value, far less work. If your travel matches Chase's boosted inventory, Points Boost returns up to 2 cents per point on a Sapphire Reserve or up to 1.5 on a Sapphire Preferred, with no award-space hunt and no irreversible transfer. You book like any other portal reservation. The limitation is simply that the boost only applies to the select hotels and flights Chase flags — if your trip is not on that list, you drop to the baseline.

3. Plain portal booking at the 1-cent baseline

Fine in a pinch, no longer a standout. Any travel booked through Chase Travel that is not on the boosted list redeems at 1 cent per point. That is a flat, predictable outcome with zero effort, and there is nothing wrong with it when you need to book and move on — but it is the same 1 cent you would get from cash, so it no longer carries the built-in premium the old flat rate did.

4. Cash back, statement credit, or gift cards

The floor, and a last resort. Redeeming points for cash back, a statement credit, or gift cards returns roughly 1 cent per point. There is nothing to confirm and nothing to hunt for, which is exactly why it is the least rewarding option. Use it when you genuinely need cash rather than travel — otherwise, almost any travel redemption ties or beats it.

Chase also still offers Pay Yourself Back in 2026, which lets you apply points against purchases in rotating categories at varying rates. It exists and can be worth a look, but the current categories and rates are industry-reported only and change on their own schedule, so treat any specific rate you see quoted elsewhere as unconfirmed until you check it in your account.

The chart shows the confirmed figures only. Note what is missing from it: transfer value. That is not an oversight — transfer redemptions are frequently worth more than the 2-cent Reserve boost, but the value swings so much by program and award that printing a single number would be misleading. The takeaway is the shape, not a tidy cents figure: the portal's non-boosted lane now matches cash at 1 cent, the boost lane roughly doubles that at best, and transfers sit above the chart entirely for those willing to do the work.

What the 2025 change means for how you should spend points

The old advice worked because the portal's flat rate was a genuinely good default that required no effort. That default is gone. As of July 2026, a non-boosted portal booking earns the same 1 cent as cash, so the "just book through the portal" habit now leaves value on the table more often than not. The weight has shifted to the two ends: Points Boost inventory when it fits your trip, and transfer partners when you are willing to hunt for award space. For many people that is a nudge to learn the transfer game they previously never needed — more work, and the irreversibility demands care, but it is now where the meaningful upside lives.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading to go deeper on the moves this guide points to: our full breakdown of Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer partners covers the airline and hotel programs worth transferring to, the hub guide on which transfer partners actually matter helps you cut the lineup down to the handful that earn their keep, and if you are weighing whether a premium card is even worth holding for these redemptions, see whether premium card annual fees pay for themselves.