The Hilton Honors Plus debit card 50,000 point welcome bonus is back, and now with double the Elite Qualifying Nights!
The Hilton Honors Plus debit card welcome bonus is back at 50,000 points, and you have until 14 December 2026 to apply.
The standard bonus for this card is 15,000 points. In March it was doubled to 30,000, and in July it jumped to 50,000 for the first time, until 7 September.
This time it works slightly differently. You earn 10,000 points on your first transaction with the card, and you will get the remaining 40,000 points when you spend £2,500 in foreign currency within six months.
The Elite Qualifying Nights bonus has also doubled, from 5 nights to 10, allowing you to climb the Hilton status ladder quicker.
We covered both of the Hilton debit cards in full when they were refreshed in March: what changed, the new Elite Qualifying Nights, and why the FX fee went up. And if the whole concept of points debit cards is new to you, this post explains why every hotel chain suddenly wants to be in your current account.
We're going to do things a bit differently in this article. First, I'm going to run you through the offer on this card. Second, how to use Hilton Honors points. Third, how to top up your Hilton Honors balance in case you're a bit short (because there are two excellent offers you need to know about). Lastly, who this card is for, and if it would be right for you.
Why does this offer matter?
The card costs £150 a year, and we value Hilton Honors points at around 0.33p each, which makes the full bonus worth £165 in our books.
Just like the summer offer, the welcome bonus alone covers the annual fee. Any points you get on top of these are a bonus.
Hilton uses dynamic pricing, so every night varies by property and date. The best way to work out if you're getting good value is to take the cash price of the same room on the same night, turn it into pence (£150 becomes 15,000), and divide that by the number of points. If the answer is around 0.3p or more, you're getting okay value. So a £150 room for 45,000 points works out at 0.33p per point.
The offer on the Hilton Honors Plus debit card
The bonus: 10,000 points on your first transaction, plus a further 40,000 points when you spend £2,500 in foreign currency within six months (normally 15,000 in total)
The sweetener: 10 extra Elite Qualifying Nights for hitting the same £2,500 foreign currency target, up from 5 in the summer
The fee: £150 a year
The status: Instant Hilton Honors Gold, which includes complimentary daily breakfast for two (worth up to £50 a night), space-available room upgrades, and an 80% points bonus on stays
The deadline: Apply by 14 December 2026
What's changed since the summer offer
If you read our post back in July, you'll remember you got 20,000 points on your first purchase, and the other 30,000 when you spent £2,500 in foreign currency within six months.
You still get 50,000 points in total, and you still need to spend £2,500 to get them. The difference is that you'll get 10,000 points on your first purchase, and the other 40,000 come when you hit the foreign currency spend target.
The good news is with the Elite Qualifying Nights. If you're new to how these work: to get status with Hilton you collect qualifying nights across a calendar year. Diamond status needs 50 of them. Normally these come from actual nights spent in Hilton beds, but this card also earns you 5 qualifying nights for every £5,000 you spend on it, up to a cap of 30 a year.
In the summer, hitting the £2,500 target earned you an extra 5 nights, but that's now been upped to 10.
Put another way, if you spend £30k using this debit card and hit the foreign currency target, you'd only need 10 real nights in Hilton hotels to reach Diamond, rather than the 50 you'd normally need. Spending £30,000 on a debit card is not most people's year, admittedly, but if you're after Diamond, this is the only card in the UK helping you get there.
Just bear in mind that Hilton counts qualifying nights by calendar year. If you apply now and hit the £2,500 target before the end of December, those 10 nights should count towards 2026. If 2027 is the year you're going for Diamond, I'd hold off on the foreign spending until January.
Remember to apply by 14 December and your six month target goes all the way into June.
What hasn't changed
The earning rates are the same as ever:
Spend type | Points per £1 |
UK spend | 1.5 |
Foreign currency | 3 |
Hilton hotels in the UK | 3 |
Hilton hotels abroad | 4.5 |
The FX fee is still 0.5% on top of Currensea's real-time rate, which remains competitive against the 2.99% most UK bank cards charge, even if we still mourn the 0% rate this card launched with. ATM withdrawals abroad are also 0.5%, rising to 2.5% once you've taken out more than £500 in a month.
Point Booster, which rounds up your transactions and sells you points at 1p each, is still not very good value.
The 10,000 point renewal bonus for spending £10,000 a year is still there too.
How to use Hilton points
Using Hilton points is about as easy as it gets. Search the Hilton website for a destination and your dates, tick "Use Points" (this could be hidden in 'special rates'), and you'll see every hotel with its price in points per night.
This is Bangkok for a week in February. The Hilton Garden Inn Bangkok Riverside is 30,000 points a night, the Millennium Hilton is 56,000, and the cheapest on the map is 20,000. (You might also spot a familiar offer in the banner at the top.)
If your dates are flexible, it gets even better. Tick "Shop by price" when you pick your dates, search with "Use Points" ticked, then hit "Select Dates" on the hotel you fancy. You'll get a calendar showing the points price of every night, month by month.
This is the Conrad Bangkok where most nights in November are 45,000 points, but pick the 18th and it's 189,000.
One more thing. The Gold status that comes with this card gets you the fifth night free on standard reward stays, so five nights at the Conrad in November would be 180,000 points rather than 225,000.
Topping up your Hilton balance - Two boosted ways!
If 50,000 points doesn't quite get you where you want to go, there are two good ways to top up right now.
The first is simply buying them. Hilton is running its best ever buy points offer, a 120% bonus when you buy 5,000 points or more, until 21 November. Buy 10,000 points and you get 12,000 bonus points on top, so 22,000 points for £82.52. That works out at around 0.375p per point.
That's a little more than the 0.33p we value them at, so I wouldn't buy them just to sit on. But if you know how many points you'll need for a stay, Hilton has never sold them cheaper. Click here to buy Hilton Honors points.
The second is if you have American Express Membership Rewards points. Normally these transfer to Hilton at 1:2, but until 24 November there's a 40% bonus, so every Membership Rewards point gets you 2.8 Hilton points. We covered it last week, alongside the Qatar Avios bonus.
Who this is for
When the bonus was 30,000 points, we said the Plus card made sense for anyone who stays at Hilton properties a few times a year. For those people, that's still true. Gold status gives you free breakfast for two, which can easily save £50 a night.
But with the bonus back at 50,000, I'd widen the recommendation again. If you've got a holiday in the next six months, and you don't already have a good card for FX, this card is worth a look even if you're not that loyal to Hilton.
The £2,500 target sounds like a lot until you remember that hotels, meals out, excursions, and all the everyday holiday spending count, as long as you're paying in the local currency. I took the Plus card with us to New Zealand for exactly this reason, and between the Hilton we paid for in Auckland (getting us 4.5 points per £1), fuel, and everything else, we sailed past the target without ever thinking about it.
The FX fees work in your favour too, as most UK bank cards charge 2.99% on foreign spending, which on £2,500 works out to around £75 in fees. This card charges 0.5%, so £12.50. Before a single bonus point has landed, you've saved yourself roughly £60 against using your normal debit card. Then you get the 50,000 points, worth around £165. Put that against the annual fee, and suddenly that fee is looking like money well spent (or should I say, Points Well Made... I'll see myself out).
If you've got nothing booked abroad in the next six months, I'd probably be giving it a miss. The 10,000 points on your first purchase won't go far towards the fee on their own, and judging by this year, the offer will probably be back. If you don't spend abroad and don't stay at Hiltons, then this one simply isn't for you, and that's fine.
One last thing, it's worth checking which UK banks work with the Currensea cards, because the card connects to your existing account through open banking.
Final thoughts
The changes to this card back in March were designed for the Hilton loyalist, and that's the way most of these debit cards go, targeted at the already engaged.
But at 50,000 points, the bonus still outstrips the fee, so as long as you've got a trip coming up, I'd be considering this card.
If you'd rather wait to line the £2,500 up with a holiday, we'll remind you nearer to the deadline of 14 December.
Sam
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.
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