Buying Avios: what every method costs, and when it's worth it

Is buying Avios worth it?

Let’s say you have 20,000 Avios and want to fly to New York in Economy. For an off-peak, one-way Economy ticket, you need 25,000 Avios to be eligible for a redemption seat. You have 80% of the points required but are short by just 5,000 Avios, which is the remaining 20% of the balance.

Based on current exchange rates, buying 5,000 Avios will cost you £92 (1.85p/pt March 2026). This doesn’t sound too bad but considering the average cost to fly New York in the economy is £420 avg (taxes £150+) it means you will need to spend 22% of the cash price of the flight to get 20% of the remaining Avios needed. It doesn’t stop there though. When you buy this flight, you still need to pay the additional taxes and fees, as your Avios only pay for the flight price.

Going by the numbers, and the fact that you still have to pay taxes, we generally don’t recommend buying Avios speculatively if you don’t have immediate plans to use them.  But you may be able to justify buying small quantities of Avios, say, if you only need a few more to top up your balance before redeeming and if you plan to redeem immediately. In such a case, it might be cheaper for you to buy additional Avios than to pay for a cash ticket provided the math works out in your favour.

Outside this limited scenario, it’s generally best to stick with alternative methods of accruing Avios, like earning points when you fly, take a holiday, hotel stay or car rental with British Airways and partner companies.

How to increase your Avios balance

Buying Avios can cost you anywhere from 0.8p per Avios point, when BA is running point purchase promotions, to as much as 3.1p per Avios point. On average, it will still cost you 1.7p per Avios point to purchase. When you come to spend them, an Avios is typically worth around 1p on reward flights. That is the number to beat when you buy: anything above about 1p and you are paying more than the Avios will return. Premium cabin long haul can reach 1.5p to 2p, while hotels, car hire and the Avios shop usually return only 0.5p to 0.6p.

For this reason, it pays to compare buying Avios other ways of boosting your Avios balance such as:

Flying with British Airways & partner airlines

Since Oct 2023, British Airways awards Avios by spend (not distance):

Includes: base fare, carrier charges, seats, bags, upgrades. 

Excludes: taxes, reward flights. Earn on BA/Iberia operated flights.

British Airways flies to more than 200 destinations in 80 countries. If you're a member of the BA Club, you can earn Avios when you fly with British Airways or its partner airlines such as Qatar Airways, Japan Airlines and Iberia.

You can use Reward Flight Finder (RFF) to find the best way to redeem your points for award flights and upgrades.

Earning Points with Credit Card Sign Up Bonuses

It is even easier to earn Avios with credit card sign-up bonuses.  For example, Amex Gold offers a great deal if you are a ‘miles and points’ newcomer where 30,000 Membership Rewards points are awarded for signing up and spending £3,000 within three months. As of 2026, there are twelve UK credit cards which let you earn Avios at a rate of at least 1 Avios per £1 spent.

How to buy Avios, and what it costs

Yes, you can buy Avios, and the cheapest way to do it costs less than half what the most obvious way costs.

There are eight routes into your account. Most people find the one linked from ba.com, pay somewhere north of 2p per Avios, and never discover that the same Avios were available at 0.92p through a route they already qualified for. Here's what each one costs.

Prices move, and bonus offers move them a long way. Treat the table as a guide, check the live figure on the programme's own page before you commit, and remember that taxes, fees and charges are payable on top of any Avios you redeem.

Avios Balance Boost: the cheapest way to buy Avios

1. Choose Avios. Sign in and select eligible transactions from the Avios you collected in the last 30 days.
2. Pick your boost. Buy 100%, 200% or 300% more Avios. The cost per Avios falls as the multiplier rises, so check the GBP total shown before you pay.
3. Pay and check your balance. The cheapest rates apply to the first 300,000 Avios you boost in a calendar year. You can still boost after that, but Avios charges more. Avios usually arrive straightaway, though they can take up to three working days.

Checked 14 October 2026 against avios.com's current product pages.

Balance Boost doesn't sell Avios at a flat rate. It lets you multiply Avios that have posted to your BA Club account in the last 30 days, at between 0.92p and 0.96p each on your first 300,000 in a year. Above that ceiling the price jumps to 1.77p.

The 30-day window is the whole trick. If you haven't earned recently there's nothing to boost, so the time to look at Balance Boost is the week a credit card bonus lands or a long-haul flight credits, not a month later when you've started planning the trip. You'll also need to have collected or redeemed Avios at some point in the last 36 months, and to hold at least one Avios in your account.

Avios Subscription, if you can commit to a year

Subscription drips Avios into your account monthly, and the annual plans are the cheapest route at scale outside Balance Boost. The largest works out at 0.99p per Avios for 200,000 a year. The smallest is 1.29p for 20,000 a year.

Paying annually is the whole game here. On every plan it saves you between 0.2p and 0.27p per Avios against the monthly price, which on the largest plan is nearly £400 a year for the same Avios. Monthly plans need a three-month minimum and renew automatically; annual plans lock you in for twelve months. The Subscription allowance sits on top of the 200,000 you can buy outright, so the two caps don't compete.

Buying Avios direct from The British Airways Club

The obvious route, and the dearest. Buying from avios.com costs between roughly 1.77p and 2.45p per Avios, falling as the quantity rises. The minimum is 2,000 and the maximum 200,000 in a calendar year, in set increments.

Bonus offers of 40% to 50% come round every couple of months and drag the effective price down close to the Subscription rate. If your trip is more than a few weeks out, waiting for one is almost always the better move. You'll need to be a member of The British Airways Club, over 18, and hold at least one Avios. If you change your mind you can cancel within 14 days, as long as you haven't spent any of them.

Iberia Club and AerClub

Both sell the same currency, and both move into your BA Club balance through Combine My Avios once the accounts have been open 90 days and show some activity. Their headline prices sit close to BA's, but they run promotions on their own schedules, so when BA has nothing on, one of them sometimes does. Worth a look if you already hold an account. Less worth opening one from scratch, given the 90-day wait before anything can move.

Finnair Plus and Qatar Airways Privilege Club

Both sell the same Avios, and both move into your BA Club balance through Combine My Avios once the accounts have been open 90 days. At standard prices neither undercuts British Airways by much. What makes them worth watching is the sales.

Finnair Plus runs discounts of up to 40%, which at the top tier has brought the price down to around 1.05p per Avios, cheaper than anything else on this page apart from Balance Boost. Qatar Airways Privilege Club runs 50% bonus offers, and it will sell you 250,000 Avios a year rather than the 200,000 cap everywhere else.

The practical point is that four programmes now sell the same currency on four different promotional calendars. When British Airways has nothing on, one of the others usually does, so it's worth checking all four before you pay full price anywhere.

Turning Nectar points and hotel points into Avios

This is the route most people underuse, and for many collectors it's the cheapest Avios they'll ever get, because they're converting a balance rather than spending new money.

Nectar converts to Avios and back again, which makes a Nectar balance the most flexible currency in the whole ecosystem. If you shop at Sainsbury's, eBay, Argos or Esso, you may already be sitting on Avios without knowing it. Our guide to Nectar and Avios covers how the link-up works.

On the hotel side, British Airways publishes the rates itself:

• Marriott Bonvoy: 3 points to 1 Avios, with 5,000 bonus Avios each time you move 60,000 points in one transaction
• IHG One Rewards: 5 points to 1 Avios, minimum 10,000
• Hilton Honors: 10 points to 1 Avios, in 10,000-point blocks
• ALL Rewards: 2 points to 1 Avios, minimum 4,000, and allow about six weeks
• MeliaRewards: 100 points to 30 Avios
• Choice Privileges: 5 points to 1 Avios, minimum 5,000

Rates are taken from British Airways' own convert your hotel points page, checked 30 August 2026. Buying hotel points purely to convert them rarely stacks up. Moving points you already hold almost always does. There's a fuller breakdown in our guide to the hotel groups that convert points to Avios.

So how much are your Avios worth?

The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what you spend them on, which is why a price per Avios only means something next to a redemption.

Take a London to New York off-peak Economy return, which the Avios Calculator currently prices at 55,000 Avios plus around £150 in taxes and fees. Say you're 5,000 short.

Cash figures are a guide only and taxes and fees are payable on top of the Avios.

That table is the whole rule in one place. Paying £123 to unlock a seat you're already 91% of the way to is a sensible trade. Paying £1,350 to buy the same seat outright is not, because you'd be paying more than the cash fare for the privilege of also paying the taxes.

Buy to finish a redemption you've already found. Don't buy to start one. And before you buy anything at all, run your actual route through the Avios Calculator so you know exactly how many Avios you're short of rather than guessing.

Running low on Avios before they expire?

Learn how to avoid losing your points and maximise redemptions before balance hits zero.

To Sum Up

While we don’t generally recommend buying Avios, since you can get better value exchanging Nectar points or AMEX membership reward points for Avios. But if you have already maximised your points earnings through other means, you may want to use the Avios you have so far, and redeem them for British Airways reward flights after a quick point purchase.