Yes. Selling credit card points and airline miles is legal in the United States. No federal statute makes it a crime, and no state treats a points sale as an offense. People do it every day, and so do the brokers who buy from them.
That is the headline. The rest of this page is the nuance behind it, because "legal" and "against the program's rules" are two different things that get tangled together constantly.
What "legal" actually means here
Legality is about the law: statutes, regulations, the things that carry criminal or civil penalties from a government. Selling a loyalty balance does not break any of them. You own the points in the practical sense, you transfer value, you get paid. Nobody is committing fraud by doing it.
Program rules are a separate universe. When you signed up for an airline or card program, you agreed to its terms and conditions. Most of those terms say miles and points are the property of the program and cannot be sold or bartered. So a sale can put you on the wrong side of a contract you signed with the airline or bank. It does not put you on the wrong side of the law.
The difference matters because the consequences are completely different. Break a law and the government can come after you. Break a contract term and the other party to the contract (the program) can enforce its own remedies, which for loyalty programs usually means closing the account or clawing back a balance. Annoying. Not criminal.
Program terms versus the law
Here is the part that trips people up. A company writing "you may not do X" in its terms does not make X illegal. It makes X a breach of that agreement, and only if the term is actually enforceable. Companies put all kinds of things in their terms. Some hold up. Some do not.
Loyalty programs lean on these no-sale clauses to protect the economics of their currency. If anyone could freely resell miles, the program loses control over how many are floating around and what they cost to redeem. That is a real business interest. It is also a private one, settled between you and the program, not a matter of public law.
So when someone tells you selling miles is "illegal," they are almost always describing a terms-of-service issue and reaching for the scariest available word. The accurate version is narrower and a lot less alarming.
The case people cite, in context
If you read about mileage selling for more than five minutes, you will run into American Airlines, Inc. v. Christensen, 967 F.2d 410 (10th Cir. 1992). It is the case brokers and bloggers reach for, usually without saying what it was about.
It was a contract dispute. American Airlines went after a group of brokers who were buying AAdvantage award travel from members and reselling it, and the fight centered on whether American's no-sale rule was enforceable and whether a court had to weigh its reasonableness before enforcing it. Civil litigation between a company and brokers over the terms of a rewards program. Not a prosecution. Nobody went to jail for selling miles, because selling miles is not a crime.
The useful takeaway is the framing, not a verdict to memorize: this has always been litigated as a question of contracts and program rules. That is the entire legal weather system around points selling. (For a closer read of the case, see the dedicated breakdown in the related links below.)
Is buying points legal too?
Same answer, same logic. Buying someone else's points is not against any law. A broker that purchases your balance is engaged in an ordinary private transaction. The program's terms may restrict transfers, which is why a careful buyer handles the mechanics with the account's own tools rather than doing anything that misrepresents who is using the account.
This is also why reputable brokers are selective. The ones worth dealing with care about doing the transaction cleanly, because a sloppy process is what actually creates problems for a seller. The legality was never the issue. The execution is.
How a careful sale protects you
Because the only real exposure is contractual (the program could object), a good broker's entire job is to keep the transaction quiet, clean, and low-friction. A few things that separates a careful process from a reckless one:
- You get paid before anything moves. Pre-payment means you are never out your balance waiting on a promise.
- A temporary access password, not your real one. You change your password to a one-time value for the transaction and reset it after. The buyer never holds lasting access to your account.
- No fishy patterns. Transfers and bookings are done in a way that looks like normal account activity, because it is.
None of that is about hiding something illegal. It is about respecting that the program has rules and not waving a flag at them. The sale is legal. The discretion is just good practice.
The bottom line
You can sell your points. It is legal. The only thing standing between you and a clean payout is the program's own terms, which are a private contract, enforced privately, with consequences that top out at losing the account. Weigh that against a balance you were not going to use well anyway, and for a lot of people the math is easy.
If you want to know what you would actually get, that part is personalized to your balance and the current market, so it is computed when you ask. Submit a balance, see a number, decide. Nothing about the process commits you until you say yes.