Walk into any grocery store, coffee shop, or big-box retailer and the offer is almost automatic: scan your card, earn your points.
Most Americans say yes. Most also forget almost immediately. The digits accumulate in accounts nobody checks, behind passwords nobody remembers, toward rewards nobody collects.
A freshly released global report has now put a dollar sign on exactly how large that pile of forgotten value has grown, and the figure lands well above what most shoppers would guess.
Why points pile up instead of paying off
The mechanism starts with the design of the programs themselves. Earning is built to feel effortless by design: a tap, a scan, a click. Redeeming demands real effort: logging in, comparing options, meeting thresholds, navigating expiration windows.
That asymmetry is not an accident. Behavioral economists call it friction by design, and it keeps points sitting in accounts long enough to quietly lapse. Each barrier makes doing nothing feel more rational than redeeming.
So people defer, and deferral becomes the default. The default becomes the bill the consumer ends up paying in lost savings.
There is also the invisibility problem. When rewards trickle in a few at a time across a dozen programs, the cumulative value never feels real enough to act on. Abstract points feel less urgent than a concrete dollar amount, and so the balance sits.
What the checkout counter looks like at scale
Picture the national tally: tens of millions of Americans enrolled in airline miles, hotel tiers, grocery chains, pharmacy chains, fast-food apps, and credit card portals simultaneously. Participation is rising, not falling.
According to the Antavo Global Customer Loyalty Report 2026, 43.2% of consumers are more likely to join a loyalty program than they were last year. Membership is at record highs. The money, though, is still not moving.
Expiring points too quickly is the top frustration for 35% of quick-service restaurant loyalty members, the number-one complaint in a March 2026 Alchemer study, eight points clear of the next gripe. Most programs set expiration windows of 12 to 36 months across retail, travel, and e-commerce.
That is a tight window for anyone spending carefully and shopping less. As a benchmark of 2,319 brands and retailers found, Americans made 7% fewer purchases in the first half of this year while spending 8% more. The gap between earning pace and expiration deadline has quietly widened for millions of shoppers.
Where the $10 billion figure comes from
US consumers are missing out on an estimated $10 billion in savings annually, according to the Antavo Global Customer Loyalty Report 2026. The report draws on a survey of 3,000 marketers and 10,000 consumers globally, including more than 1,000 US consumers, and incorporates 500 million loyalty member actions tracked via Antavo’s platform.
The headline breakdown is precise. Over a quarter, specifically 26.2% of loyalty points, go unspent, and 11.9% expire unused. That second number is the sharper one: those are not points a shopper chose to ignore. They were points someone earned, intended to use, and then lost to a deadline they forgot.
The $10 billion estimate is derived from a Research and Markets valuation of the US loyalty market at approximately $27 billion annually. Separate industry research from Bond Brand Loyalty finds that a significant share of loyalty members report having lost points to expiration at least once, a frustration the Antavo data echoes, with 41.1% of respondents citing expiring points as a top grievance.
Nearly half. That is the median loyalty experience in the United States right now, not an edge case. The frustration the data describes is the normal one, not the outlier.
Where the gap holds and where it starts to close
The $10 billion figure is a real ceiling, not a floor, because some programs have begun to chip away at it. Programs that send expiration reminders, lower point thresholds, and allow transfers between members consistently post higher redemption rates.
Platform data from 500 million member interactions in the Antavo report shows that 74% of members quietly disengage within two months of joining, stopping activity while remaining enrolled. Brands that ignore the gap pay for it in churn, and only 3.4% of members formally opt out, meaning most disengaged customers can still be reached with the right messaging.
The most striking behavioral detail in the data is about motivation. Research cited alongside the Antavo findings suggests that roughly half of consumers would rather donate their rewards to charity than let them lapse, yet almost no program connects those two facts.
The psychology overlaps with a broader pattern: the same impulse toward tangible, cash-equivalent value that shapes how Americans feel about tap-to-pay versus physical cash also seems to apply to reward redemption. Abstract points feel less real than a concrete discount or donation.
What shoppers can do and what is still unresolved
Consumers consistently tell researchers they want no expiration on points, more ways to earn, and more flexibility when redeeming. Those are achievable program changes, and some retailers are moving toward them, but the pace is slow relative to the scale of the problem.
For the ordinary shopper, the practical upshot is clear: the value is real, but it requires deliberate attention. Treating loyalty balances the way households increasingly treat subscriptions, as a recurring line item to audit rather than a background hum to ignore, is the behavioral shift the data points toward.
More than half of Americans already budget carefully, and loyalty balances deserve the same scrutiny as any other spending category.
Ten billion dollars a year is sitting in limbo between programs that frustrate and programs that actually pay off. Right now, the programs, not the shoppers, hold the key to unlocking it.
