How to earn RevPoints: The Complete Guide

RevPoints are one of the more interesting loyalty currencies in the UK, and the earning side of it is far deeper than "spend on your card and see what happens."

Between plan-based earn rates, boosted merchant offers, booking bonuses, and the odd transfer bonus, there's a strategy to be had here if you know where to look.

I covered the basics of RevPoints and how the plans compare in my overview guide. This one goes deep on every way to actually earn the points, including the parts that change week to week, which is exactly why they're worth understanding properly rather than assuming your plan's headline rate is the whole story.

Card spend: the foundation

Your Revolut plan sets your baseline earn rate, and it's the one number that never changes on you. Standard earns 1 point per £10 spent, Plus improves that to 1 per £5, Premium to 1 per £4, Metal to 1 per £2, and Ultra tops out at 1 point per £1, matching some of the best credit card earn rates going, on a debit product (read all about Revolut plans here).

For the purposes of this article, just know that everything below sits on top of whatever your plan already earns you.

What actually counts as an eligible purchase

Before you start planning your points strategy around it, it's worth knowing that not every pound you spend on your Revolut card earns RevPoints. The rule of thumb is that it has to be a purchase of goods or services, which sounds obvious until you look at what that excludes. Anything that behaves like cash or money movement is out: currency exchange, cash withdrawals, transfers to another account, wallet, or card, and crypto purchases don't count, since Revolut treats these as financial transactions rather than spending.

Tax payments, fines, and anything paid to government or judicial bodies are excluded too, as are gambling, betting, and lottery spend, utility bills, and payments to charities, political organisations, religious organisations, and educational institutions. A long tail of niche business categories is also excluded, covering things like housing, rent, parking, cleaning and maintenance services, advertising and marketing, and anything classified as unclassified business-to-business spend. Certain retailers are excluded outright based on their merchant category code, tobacco being the obvious example.

None of this is likely to derail your everyday spending strategy, since groceries, dining, general shopping, and travel bookings are all squarely in scope. But it does mean you shouldn't expect points on rent, council tax, gambling apps, or sending money to a friend, and if your card spend feels lower than expected in a given month, this is usually why.

It's also worth knowing that you need to actively switch RevPoints on in the app before any of this starts counting, rather than it happening automatically the moment you get a Revolut card. There's a 14-day window after you first activate it where you can change your mind and close the RevPoints account down again; if you do, any points you've purchased get refunded, though anything you've earned through spending or other activities is forfeited.

Worth bearing in mind too that if you return or cancel something you earned points on, Revolut claws the points back, and if you've already spent them, your balance can go negative until you earn enough to bring it back to zero.

Booking stays and experiences in-app

The single easiest upgrade to your earning is to book through the Revolut app rather than around it. Stays booked in-app can earn up to 10 points per £1 spent, and

Experiences up to 5 points per £1, both comfortably ahead of even the Ultra card-spend rate.

If a hotel or a day out was happening regardless, checking whether Revolut's own booking tools cover it first is close to free points, since you're not changing your spending, just where you route it.

Shops and Revolut Pay: the richest, most volatile earner

This is where RevPoints gets interesting, she says with a shimmy, and also where it gets a bit unpredictable. Shopping with participating retailers via Shops and Revolut Pay earns up to 20 points per £10 spent as standard, and the actual rate varies significantly by merchant, with Revolut running an ongoing Shops x RevPoints "Booster" promotion that shows the applicable rate for each retailer right on the Revolut Pay checkout screen before you pay.

At the time of writing, current deals include Uber and Intrepid Travel, both offering 10 points per £10 spent, while a broad range of airlines, British Airways, Qatar Airways, Virgin Atlantic, BudgetAir, AirAsia, Aer Lingus, Vueling, TUI, and several others, sit at 2 points per £10 spent. None of these rates are fixed, and Revolut can add, remove, or reprice merchants at any time, so treat any specific number here as a snapshot rather than a promise.

The only real strategy is habit: check the Shops section before any purchase where a merchant might be featured, especially travel bookings and bigger-ticket spend, and treat a good rate as a reason to buy now rather than something to plan around long-term.

Spare change round-ups

The quietest earner in the programme. Every eligible card purchase gets rounded up to the nearest pound, and Revolut uses the difference to buy you RevPoints automatically. The rate below is essentially buying a RevPoint at 2p each, which is a poor rate. We would not recommend this.

Buying RevPoints directly

Less well known is that you can buy RevPoints outright through the app, either as a one-off top-up or as a recurring monthly purchase.

Pricing scales in tiers:

• 250 points costs £5

• 500 points costs £9.83

• 1,000 points costs £19.02

• 4,000 points costs £72.72

• 15,000 points costs £240

That works out at around 2p per point at the smallest tier, dropping to roughly 1.6p per point at the largest.

Setting up a recurring monthly purchase brings the price down further still, with discounts of up to 32% off the standard one-off rate.

One detail worth knowing if you do top up: bought points are redeemed with priority, ahead of points you've earned through spending or other activity. So if you buy a top-up specifically to complete a redemption, that's exactly the balance that gets used first, rather than getting mixed in behind points you've already earned.

This isn't really an "earning" method in the traditional sense, and it's rarely the best way to build a balance from scratch, even at the cheapest bulk rate, you're paying more per point than most redemptions are likely to be worth. Where it does make sense is when you're just short of the number needed for a specific redemption, most commonly a flight, and topping up the gap is cheaper than the alternative of waiting or missing the availability altogether (but do check to see if it's cheaper to buy the airline currency direct, instead of buying RevPoints to transfer).

Outside of that scenario, you'll almost always get better value earning points through spend or boosted offers than paying for them directly.

What about sign-up bonuses?

Worth repeating clearly, since it trips people up coming from the credit card world: there is no RevPoints sign-up bonus. Opening an account or upgrading your plan doesn't hand you a chunk of points the way a new credit card application often does. What Revolut does offer is cash-based welcome and referral promotions, available to new customers signing up through a specific promotional or referral link, along with occasional free-trial periods on paid plans. These are genuinely worth having, but they sit entirely outside the RevPoints programme, landing as cash or as a temporary plan upgrade rather than as points in your balance.

Getting the most out of earning

If you take one thing from this guide, make it this: your plan tier does more heavy lifting than any individual promotion. Someone spending £1,000 a month on Standard earns 100 points; the same spend on Ultra earns 1,000. No boosted merchant offer closes a gap that size. Decide your plan based on your regular spending and the non-points perks you'll actually use, then layer the rest on top.

Beyond that, a few habits compound nicely. Route bookings you were making anyway through Stays and Experiences rather than paying elsewhere. Get into the routine of checking the Shops section before any purchase, particularly bigger ticket items where a temporary multiplier is worth waiting a day or two for. And only consider buying points outright when you're topping up a specific, imminent redemption, not as a general strategy.

One last thing worth flagging if you also run a Revolut Business account: RevPoints for Business exists as a separate scheme through Revolut's Titan feature, with its own earning structure and a cap of 10,000 points per user per month. It's a distinct programme from the personal RevPoints covered in this guide, so don't expect your business spend and personal spend to pool together automatically.

None of this replaces having a credit card in the mix if you're eligible for one and comfortable with it, since the very best welcome bonuses and everyday earn rates still tend to live there. But as a debit-based programme open to everyone, RevPoints earns its place, and the boosted offers in particular reward the habit of just checking before you pay.

Helena

Points Well Made is a passion project from Sam and Helena. If you've enjoyed this and want to help us keep the lights on, please consider buying us a Ko-fi or subscribing monthly. You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok for more of the same. Thanks for reading.