Estate planning as a McDonald’s account holder

MyMcDonald’s Rewards is the free loyalty program inside the McDonald’s app. Members earn 100 points for every $1 spent on qualifying purchases and can start redeeming at 1,500 points for free food and drinks at participating restaurants. The points balance is the only estate-relevant asset, and it sits entirely inside a personal McDonald’s account. Under the Terms and Conditions for McDonald’s Online Services, points are not property, have no cash value, are not assignable or transferable between accounts, and immediately expire when an account terminates for any reason. Points also expire on a rolling six-month schedule, so an unused balance does not accumulate indefinitely.

McDonald’s points are forfeited at death under the program's terms. The terms explicitly state that points are not the account holder's property and cannot be inherited, transferred by will, or assigned through any estate planning mechanism.

What happens at death

MyMcDonald’s Rewards points are forfeited. The Terms and Conditions for McDonald’s Online Services (USA) state, under the heading "No rights in points," that "Points are not property and you have no vested right or interest in points. Points have no cash value. Points are not assignable or transferrable between online services accounts or otherwise, and points cannot be combined across accounts, regardless of who registered the account." The same terms provide that "Upon termination of your online services account for any reason (including, but not limited to, whether you choose to close your account or McDonald’s terminates your account for a violation of these terms), all points that you have accumulated in MyMcDonald’s Rewards will immediately expire." There is no beneficiary designation and no published way to inherit points. The US terms do not address death anywhere; the forfeiture outcome follows from the not-property, non-transferable, and termination-expires-points provisions rather than from a US death clause. McDonald’s does publish an explicit death clause in its UK Rewards Terms (Section 20, "Death of account holder"), which states that "A MyMcDonald’s Rewards account will terminate on the death of the account holder. On notification of an account holder’s death, McDonald’s will close that account holder’s MyMcDonald’s Rewards account and all points in that account will be cancelled." Separately, points expire on the first day of the month after the sixth month from the day they were earned, so an unredeemed balance also lapses on its own over time. McDonald’s publishes no dedicated bereavement or estate-claims process for the program in the United States; reporting a death runs through general McDonald’s Customer Service.

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