Bilt Ends Milestone Rewards January 1 — You’ll Earn Spendable Cash On Top Of Your Points Instead

Bilt is replacing its ‘Milestone Rewards’ earned between status levels with Bilt Cash while you’ll earn starting January 1, 2026. This is on top of the points you earn today, and will be more valuable than the Milestone Rewards program.

• Every 25,000 Bilt points you earn also rewards you with $50 in “Bilt Cash” which can be used as cash across their ecosystem – restaurant dining, fitness classes, parking etc.

• So you’re earning money to spend with their partners, on top of the points you already earn today. (You can’t redeem at the Rewards Network restaurant program they co-brand, but you can redeem at any restaurant in their own native program, as well as for GoPuff home delivery, in their new parking program, or for cash off through thier travel portal, etc.)

• You’ll also be able to spend Bilt Cash to buy access to elite member offers. So if you’re a silver member, Bilt Cash will let you buy access to a Rent Day status bonus for Golds or Platinums. Or you can redeem Bilt Cash for early access to a comedy show or dining event. They haven’t shared how much Bilt Cash will be required for this, other than that the amounts will vary.

Bilt reports more than 5 million members, that they’re processing rent payments for 25% of the rental properties in the U.S., and that they have “over 40,000 merchants” in their partner ecosystem, although Rewards Network reports over 20,000 restaurants so I assume those need to be backed out to get the true sense of scale here.

Milestone Rewards, which are being replaced, was probably misnamed. These were framed as meaningful rewards for stretching your engagement between status levels. But they were pretty weak sauce for that in my view – the reward is you’d earn maybe 1,000 extra points if you transacted more in specific ways. Not much of an incentive!

Truthfully, though, these were really just offers to get you to engage more with their partners in specific ways (rather than something you’d earned). I didn’t think this quite worked, and that was probably right since Bilt is retiring them. But thinking about them that way is useful now, because Bilt Cash is a continuation of the effort – but I think far more powerful.

The goal is clearly to deepen engagement in their ecosystem. You earn credit to spend in their network by spending in their network. It’s self-reinforcing. The currency you earn helps grease their ecosystem, delivering more value to partners and rewarding customers for transacting, which in turn should drive greater transactions.

The potential here is really significant, as Bilt’s partner ecosystem grows. The more places to earn and spend, the easier it is to earn their currency and the more useful that currency becomes.

If you could redeem points for Bilt Cash, too, they’d have another way to create more of this proprietary in-network currency. Actually, I’d love to see the conversions work both ways but a challenge is the math on that since conversions might not be favorable (and two way conversions make that more transparent).

Uber had visions of creating its own currency that would be useful with partners and in the broader economy. The primary way Uber Cash was earned was through its cash back credit card, and they never really delivered on that program (they never much marketed it in-app and during rides even). And it became one of the first victims of staff cuts and focused vision as they prepared to go public.

Bilt has a growing stable of partnerships that makes this quite valuable. Obviously there’s a lot more partner density in major cities, so this is most useful to members in New York, Chicago, Miami, et al. But since you can even spend the Bilt Cash through their travel portal (where their points are worth 1.25 cents apiece and they’ve overcome most of the problems of other portals) anyone will get real value pretty much.