What Are KrisFlyer Miles Worth? One Cent, or Five

You have a balance of miles. The airline shows you the number and never shows you a price.

So here is the price, and the striking thing about it is the range. A KrisFlyer mile is worth roughly one cent if you spend it one way, and roughly five cents if you spend it another. On a balance of 100,000 miles, that is the difference between S$1,000 and S$5,000.

Nothing about the miles changes between those two numbers. No skill, no status, no secret. The entire gap is one decision — what you point them at — and this article is about making that decision on purpose.

The easy option pays about a cent

Start with the floor, because it is the option you get for doing nothing at all.

Since 1 July 2025, Singapore Airlines has converted miles at the same rate everywhere in its own world: 100 miles = S$1. That covers the KrisShop, Kris+ at partner shops and restaurants, Pelago experiences, and paying for part of an ordinary ticket with miles. One cent a mile, no seat to hunt for, no dates to work around. Before that the rate wandered between about 0.67 and 0.95 cents depending on which door you used.

The tempting conclusion is that a mile can therefore never be worth less than a cent. That is wrong, and the reason matters, because there is a difference between the rate you are given and the value you receive.

One cent is what the airline credits you. What you actually get depends on whether the thing you bought was fairly priced to begin with. The example worth remembering comes from The MileLion: a pair of Sony headphones at S$559 in the KrisShop and S$507.76 on Amazon. Pay the KrisShop price in miles and you have handed over 55,900 miles for S$507.76 of headphones — 0.91 cents a mile. The rate was honoured to the letter. The value simply was not there.

So the cent is a ceiling on the lazy option rather than a floor beneath you, and it varies by door:

• Kris+ comes closest to a real cent, because the shops and restaurants charge their ordinary prices.
• Paying part of a ticket in miles is close, but not clean — a ticket part-paid with miles earns you fewer miles back than the full cash fare would have, and that loss is a real cost.
• The KrisShop is where a cent becomes the most you could possibly get, and only on things the shop cannot mark up.

Which sets up the only question that matters for the rest of this piece: what has to be true for a mile to be worth several times that?

Why business class changes the answer

The answer is not about luxury. It is a quirk in how the airline prices two different things.

Singapore Airlines publishes a chart showing how many miles each seat costs. Here it is for the routes in this article.

Look at what that chart charges. A business seat costs about two to two and a half times the miles of an economy seat. A Suite, about three times. Those are not estimates — that is division applied to a published document.

Now think about the cash prices for those same two seats. On a long-haul route, a business ticket does not cost two and a half times the economy fare. It costs a great deal more than that. We are deliberately not printing a number, because the honest one is whatever you saw on the day you looked.

And there is the whole thing. The airline charges a big premium in dollars for the front of the aircraft, and only a small premium in miles. Your miles do not know which seat they are buying. Point them where those two gaps are widest and each mile does several times the work.

It also explains why the thrifty-feeling move is usually the worst one. Spending miles on a cheap economy ticket means handing over a currency worth a cent to buy the one seat the airline is already discounting for cash.

Our own 2013 spreadsheet showed this before we understood it. Singapore to London, the same route on the same day: against the flexible economy fare a mile came out at 3.24 cents, against the deepest economy sale fare 0.91 cents, and in business 4.67 cents. One mile, five times the difference, decided purely by what it was aimed at.

One caution before you get excited. The chart is flat, but the availability is not. The cheap business seats are released in far smaller numbers than the cheap economy ones, so the best rung on the ladder is the hardest one to actually stand on. Our own Cape Town booking further down is what that looks like when it goes against you.

The question that keeps you honest

Now the mistake, which was ours before it was anyone else’s.

That 2013 spreadsheet valued the London business seat at its published fare of S$7,366, and reported a handsome answer. The figure was fictional, in a way that matters: we were never going to spend S$7,366 on that ticket. Nobody in the family was. Without the miles, we would have flown economy or stayed home.

The MileLion puts the correction more bluntly than we would dare: you cannot claim your miles are worth a high figure unless you would genuinely have paid cash for that ticket.

So the honest question is not “what was that seat worth?” but “what would I actually have spent if the miles had not existed?” For most people the true answer for a premium seat sits somewhere between “the economy fare I would really have booked” and “the business fare I enjoyed” — and exactly where is a personal judgement nobody can look up for you.

That is what the slider below is for. Put in your own numbers.

Drag that slider to zero on any preset and watch the answer fall apart. That collapse is the honest argument against miles for a household that would never buy a premium seat with cash, and it deserves saying as plainly as the argument for. If you would fly economy regardless, a business redemption is a real pleasure and a poor financial case, and a simple cashback card was probably the better tool all along.

The case for miles survives that test for two kinds of people: those who would genuinely have bought the front cabin, and those for whom the upgrade is worth a large slice of its price even though they would not have paid all of it. Both are honest positions. Neither is everybody.

Is it beating a plain cashback card?

Once you know what your miles are worth, the card question is simple arithmetic.

Miles beat cashback when what a mile is worth, times how many miles you earn per dollar, is more than the cashback rate. Rearranged, that gives the one number to carry around:

cashback rate ÷ miles per dollar = the value per mile you need

At the 1.7% paid by the best flat cashback card in Singapore:

Read that against the cent you get for cashing out and something uncomfortable falls out. An ordinary card earning 1.2 to 1.4 miles per dollar does not beat cashback if you cash the miles out. It needs 1.21 to 1.42 cents a mile just to draw level — so miles spent in the KrisShop would have been better off as cashback, with no annual fee and no three-year expiry clock.

One caveat on the bottom row, since it is the one people misread: 4 miles per dollar applies to a slice of your spending, not all of it. Those cards stop paying the bonus rate after about S$1,000 a month. We have written separately about what that does to your real average, and the short version is that it lands most households far closer to the 1.2 and 1.4 rows.

Which produces the sentence this section exists for. The miles game is not free money. It is paid work. The wages are the gap between what you earn and the cashback you turned down. Decide whether you want the job before optimising how you do it.

The catch: the cheap seats barely exist

One more thing stands between a published price and an actual seat, and it is what turns a tidy calculation into a hobby.

The airline sells the same seat at up to four different prices. Cheapest is Saver, and nearly all the value in this article lives there. Advantage costs about 80% more and is far easier to get. Access is dearer still and always available. Promo is cheapest of all and almost never there.

Saver seats on a popular route in a school holiday are gone the moment booking opens, eleven and a half months ahead. A six-seat family redemption is not a booking; it is a diary entry made a year in advance.

We can price what that scarcity costs, because we paid it. Four of us flew to Cape Town on SQ 478 on Thursday 4 June this year — one aeroplane, one date, four seats in the same cabin. Two were booked at Saver, 56,500 miles each. The other two, booked a week later once it was clear no more cheap seats would appear, cost 103,500 miles each.

Identical seats on an identical flight, 83% apart. Not a better cabin, not a better date, not more flexibility in any way we noticed. The only difference was that two cheap seats existed and two did not. Those two extra bookings cost 94,000 miles more, which is most of another long-haul business ticket, spent on nothing.

One boundary on all of this: this is a Singapore Airlines article. KrisFlyer also books Star Alliance partners on a separate chart, and several of those airlines add fuel surcharges that KrisFlyer passes straight to you, which can eat a redemption before you have flown a metre. That deserves its own piece.

The price can change while you are saving

And now the risk no amount of cleverness removes.

Nine months ago these seats were repriced, and every mile already earned was worth less the next morning. Notice where the increases landed: on the awards that are actually available, and on the zone that had been the best value on the chart. In fairness, economy fares in the nearer zones got cheaper — the revision had a direction, and it was to charge more for the front of the aircraft, which is exactly where this article says the value is.

The longer view comes from our own file. That 2013 workbook priced a Singapore–London business return at 136,000 miles, including a 15% discount then given for booking online. The same return today costs 217,000 miles.

There are two honest ways to read that. What a customer actually pays rose 136,000 → 217,000, up 59.6%, or 3.8% a year, because the online discount was itself withdrawn along the way. What the chart charges rose 160,000 → 217,000, up 35.6%, or 2.4% a year. The first is what your balance experiences; the second is the cleaner like-for-like. Neither is small.

Call it what it is: an inflation rate on a currency you cannot hedge, set by the people who issue it, announced after the fact. It is not a reason to avoid miles. It is a decisive reason to treat a balance as perishable rather than saved — and it sits on top of the programme’s own three-year expiry.

Which gives the most valuable habit in the whole hobby, and it is not clever: earn towards a trip you can already name, and book it. Miles held are exposed to a chart that will be revised. Miles booked are a seat.

What we actually redeemed

Here is our ledger, taken from the confirmation emails rather than from memory.

One and a half million miles, and S$5,215 of tax, for thirty one-way journeys in the front of the aircraft. Three things in it are worth pulling out.

The taxes are not a rounding error. They came to S$5,215.35 in cash and they are wildly uneven: the Johannesburg–Singapore leg alone was S$2,236.68 — 43% of all the tax across nine bookings — for a single flight. The same trip outbound cost S$65.20 a head; coming home cost S$559.17 a head, eight and a half times as much, same four people, same cabin. Award tickets are not free tickets.

You can watch the chart move. The Shanghai seats were booked in January 2024 at 43,000 miles each, the going rate then. The Sydney Suite was booked on 6 November 2025 at 178,500 — the price on a chart that had taken effect five days earlier. Both were correct on the day. Neither is correct now.

And you get the seat that exists, which is the Cape Town pair above.

Two honest notes. First, we have deliberately not published a cents-per-mile figure for any of these, and will not. Doing so would mean telling you what we would have paid in cash for seats we did not buy, which is a judgement about our household rather than a fact — exactly the move this article warns against. The miles and taxes are exact, they are loaded into the tool as presets, and the honest part is yours to supply.

Second, the thing that generalises is not financial. Those family redemptions happened because somebody sat down eleven months ahead and held the dates. That is a planning habit, not a money technique, and it is what separates people who fly on miles from people who accumulate them.

What to do with the miles you have

Five steps, and the first two settle it for most people.

1. Answer the honest question first. Would you, with your own money, buy a long-haul premium ticket? If the answer is a settled no, the case for miles over cashback is weak, and this is a hobby you may still enjoy — just not one filed under money management.

2. Work out the number your card has to beat. Cashback rate divided by miles per dollar. On an ordinary 1.2 to 1.4 card you need a redemption above roughly 1.2 to 1.4 cents a mile to have been right, and cashing out will not get you there.

3. Point them at the front of the aircraft, where the miles price and the cash price are furthest apart — which is also, unhelpfully, where the cheap seats are scarcest.

4. Book, do not accumulate. Name the trip, then earn towards it. A balance faces a chart revision and a three-year clock. A confirmed seat faces neither.

5. Then price what you actually did, honestly, with the tool above. If the answer comes out under a cent, the programme is telling you something useful, and it is not a criticism of the trip.