Ultimate Rewards Transfer Times

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How Long Do Chase Ultimate Rewards Points Take to Transfer? This is critical, since the best value use of the Ultimate Rewards earned with the Chase Sapphire Preferred, Sapphire Reserve, or Ink Business Preferred is to transfer to airline frequent flyer programs to reserve business class or first class award tickets.

For most airline and hotel partners, the transfer time is close to instant. That said, points don't always transfer instantly–they can take hours or even days in some cases, even for a partner that you've previously transferred points instantly to. Before we get to a recent example of a delay, here are the typical Chase Ultimate Rewards transfer times:

• Aer Lingus: Instant
• Air Canada Aeroplan: Instant
• Air France/KLM Flying Blue: Instant
• British Airways Avios: Instant
• Emirates Skywards: Instant
• Finnair: Instant
• Hyatt: Instant
• Iberia Avios: Instant
• IHG: Instant
• JetBlue TrueBlue: Instant
• Marriott Rewards: ~1 day
• Qatar Privilege Club Avios: Instant
• Singapore KrisFlyer: Usually 24 Hours or less
• Southwest: Instant
• United: Usually Instant (but see below)
• Virgin Atlantic Flying Club: Instant

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Delays with Ultimate Rewards Transfers to United MileagePlus

Virtually all of our Ultimate Rewards to United MileagePlus have been instant. But there was an incident a few years ago when I was surprised to find that a 20,000 points transfer from my husband's Ultimate Rewards account to United MileagePlus didn't go through instantly. We'd previously transferred from his Ultimate Rewards account to his United MileagePlus account, earlier this year in fact, and it was instantaneous.

This time, even after repeatedly logging out and logging back in, the miles weren't there. One hour went by–no miles. Two hours, then three hours–no miles. Not until roughly 15 hours later did the miles appear.

Nor is this an isolated occurrence–there have been cases this year, in 2025, when a transfer from a credit card authorized user to that user's MileagePlus account or a transfer to a spouse's MileagePlus account was delayed, or in another case, a 40K transfer to MileagePlus failed and was instead the Ultimate Rewards points were redeposited.

Another Flyertalker notes that a Chase representative said that most delayed or failed transfers are due to two reasons:

• Name discrepancies between the Chase account name and the MileagePlus account name
• Some transfers of 100,000 points or more are flagged for manual review

If transferring Ultimate Rewards points to United MileagePlus is important, I recommend leaving plenty of time in advance of when the miles are needed to book an award, in case you do encounter a delay.

Have you ever experienced delays when transferring Ultimate Rewards points to United MileagePlus, or to another Ultimate Rewards partner where transfer time is normally instantaneous?

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