Planning ahead for your Citi ThankYou points
Lifetime transfer options and steps to take now for Citibank points
Citi ThankYou Service Center
Citi Estate Servicing Center (deposit and credit card accounts)
Citibank does not guarantee transfer of points after death. Lifetime planning provides options for managing points and controlling who has access to them.
Citi ThankYou allows members to transfer points to other program members during their lifetime. Fees may apply, but this is a direct way to move points to family members while you are alive.
How to protect your Citi ThankYou points
7 steps for managing your Citi ThankYou points during your lifetime:
Family sharing
ThankYou Points can be pooled across the cardholder's own Citi ThankYou-earning accounts and transferred to airline and hotel partner loyalty programs, where the partner loyalty account must be in the cardholder's own name. Person-to-person Points Sharing is a more complicated picture. Citi's own published agreement still contains it: "Points Sharing. You may give Points to another Member's ThankYou Account. The total number of Points a Member can share is 100,000 Points in a given calendar year and the total number of Points a Member can receive from other Members is 100,000 Points in a calendar year," and Citi's ThankYou Rewards FAQs page still lists "Sharing points with other ThankYou members" as a redemption option. Against that, Citi was widely reported to have notified cardholders that "Effective 5/17/2026, Point Sharing will no longer be offered as a ThankYou Rewards redemption option," with the last day to share or receive points being May 16, 2026, and shared points expiring 90 days after the date they were shared. That notice is quoted only in secondary reporting; no Citi page we can read carries it. Anyone planning around Points Sharing should confirm its current availability with the ThankYou Service Center at 1-800-842-6596 before relying on it. Either way, sharing has never been a route around the death clause — it is a lifetime redemption option, and once the member dies the executor's only published route is the Cash Rewards request.
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Frequently asked questions
Use them or move them while you are alive. Transferring points to an airline or hotel partner loyalty program in your own name takes them out of the ThankYou agreement and puts them under the partner program's rules, including its own death policy. Redeeming for travel, gift cards, or cash draws the balance down. What you should not do is bank a large balance on the assumption your family will collect it: the only route your executor has is a discretionary, cash-only redemption they must request in writing within a year, at a rate Citi does not publish.
Citi's published agreement still describes person-to-person Points Sharing — "You may give Points to another Member's ThankYou Account," capped at 100,000 points shared and 100,000 received per calendar year — and its ThankYou FAQs page still lists sharing points with other members. Citi was widely reported to have notified cardholders that Points Sharing ends effective May 17, 2026, but that notice appears only in secondary reporting, not on any Citi page. Confirm the current position with the ThankYou Service Center at 1-800-842-6596 before planning around it. Partner transfers remain available, but the partner loyalty account must be in your own name.
Not on a clock, but they are tied to your account. The agreement ties the loss of points to what happens to the account rather than to an expiration date: if you voluntarily close your Citi Account, or Citi closes it for inactivity, you have sixty (60) days to use the points; if Citi closes it for any other reason, you lose them immediately; if your ThankYou Account is closed for any reason, you lose them immediately; and if Citi cancels the ThankYou Program, you have ninety (90) days to redeem. Keeping an enrolled card open and in good standing is what keeps the balance alive.
An inventory listing the Citi ThankYou account lets a fiduciary identify it and act on it through the operator's official channels.
There is no beneficiary designation option for Citi ThankYou. This account type does not support naming a recipient the way bank or investment accounts do.
Sources
Data sourced from Citibank primary sources (7 pages reviewed). How we research.
Citi ThankYou Service Center
Citi Estate Servicing Center (deposit and credit card accounts)
