Key Points

  • The 2026 Companion Pass threshold is 135,000 qualifying points or 100 qualifying one-way flights, with a 10,000-point boost for any open Southwest co-branded card that effectively drops the bar to 125,000.
  • A personal-plus-business Southwest card pairing through Chase remains the fastest legitimate path to qualification, and yes, credit-card spend and welcome bonuses still count toward CPQP in 2026.
  • The pass is worth chasing if you fly Southwest at least 4 to 6 round trips per year with the same companion, less compelling if you don't.

TL;DR

As of April 2026, qualify by earning 135,000 Rapid Rewards points (or 100 one-way flights) in a calendar year. Your open Southwest card knocks 10,000 off, leaving 125,000. Credit-card welcome bonuses still count.

The pitch, in one paragraph

The Southwest Companion Pass is the single best loyalty benefit in U.S. domestic travel, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. Once you earn it, you pick one person, that person flies with you on every Southwest itinerary you book for the rest of the qualifying year plus the entire next year, and they pay only the federal taxes and fees. About $11.20 round-trip domestic. That is not a typo. Two seats for one fare, on the airline that flies more domestic routes than anyone except maybe Delta on a good day. If you and a partner take even three Southwest round trips a year, the pass pays for itself many times over.

What the Companion Pass actually is

The Companion Pass lets you designate one person, anyone you want, as your travel companion. Once designated, they ride free on every Southwest flight you book during the pass's validity period, paid or award. They pay only the security and 9/11 fees, which on a domestic round trip works out to roughly $11.20 total. International routes, mostly Mexico, the Caribbean, and a slim Central America footprint, run higher in foreign taxes, usually $50 to $100 round trip depending on the destination.

You can change your designated companion up to three times per calendar year. You cannot, however, hold simultaneous future bookings with two different companions, so the swap usually means flying off the existing one's bookings or canceling them first.

The validity window is the catch worth memorizing. The pass is good for the rest of the calendar year you earn it in plus the entire following calendar year. Earn it on January 15 and you get nearly 24 months. Earn it on December 20 and you get 12 months and change. The timing of when you cross the threshold is the single biggest variable in how much value you wring out of this thing.

The 2026 earning rules, no fluff

You qualify for the Companion Pass by hitting one of two thresholds in a single calendar year:

  • 135,000 Companion Pass Qualifying Points, or
  • 100 qualifying one-way Southwest flights.

Anyone with an open Southwest co-branded credit card on the first business day of the calendar year gets a 10,000 CPQP boost. That means cardholders are really chasing 125,000 net points. If you are reading this and considering the credit-card path, the 10,000 boost is essentially free; you are going to hold a card during the qualifying year anyway.

What counts as Companion Pass Qualifying Points in 2026:

  • Base points earned on Southwest revenue flights (not the bonus tier-of-fare multipliers, just the base points)
  • Points earned from spend on any Southwest-branded Chase credit card, including welcome bonuses
  • Anniversary bonus points from those cards
  • Points earned through Rapid Rewards partners (hotels, car rentals, the dining program)

What does not count toward CPQP, even though they hit your regular Rapid Rewards balance:

  • Points purchased
  • Points transferred from a partner program (this is where Chase Ultimate Rewards transfers stop being useful for CPQP, even though they hit your regular Rapid Rewards balance)
  • Points earned through the Rapid Rewards shopping portal
  • Promotional or referral points unless explicitly designated as CPQP-eligible

I want to flag something here because there is a lot of bad information floating around: yes, credit-card spend and welcome bonuses still count toward CPQP in 2026. The rules tightened on which fares earn elite tier-qualifying points (a separate program entirely), but the Companion Pass's CPQP definition still treats card spend as fully qualifying. You can technically earn a Companion Pass without setting foot on a Southwest plane.

The dual-card play

This is the play almost everyone uses, and it works because Chase issues separate personal and business Southwest cards with separate welcome bonuses that both count toward your CPQP total.

Current welcome offers as of April 2026:

Run the math on the most common pairing, Performance Business plus Priority, both at full bonus:

  • 80,000 (Performance welcome) + 5,000 (Performance spend at 1x for hitting $5,000) = 85,000
  • 50,000 (Priority welcome, conservative) + 1,000 (Priority spend at 1x for hitting $1,000) = 51,000
  • 10,000 cardholder boost (assuming an open card on the first business day of the year)
  • Total: 146,000 CPQP, comfortably over the 125,000 net threshold

Take the higher Priority offer or the higher Performance promo cycle and the cushion grows. You can hit this with one personal and one business card, finished in three months of meeting minimum spend, and the rest of the year is gravy.

The catch with the business card is you need a legitimate small business or sole-proprietor activity to apply, and Chase does check. Side hustles count: freelancing, reselling, consulting, a tutoring side gig. If you don't have a business in any form, you are stuck with two personal Southwest cards, and Chase has historically restricted you from holding more than one personal Southwest card at a time, which complicates the math considerably.

Timing it for maximum runway

Here is where most people screw this up. The Companion Pass clock is calendar-year based, not card-anniversary based. So the goal is to cross the 125,000-point net threshold as early in a calendar year as you possibly can, because every month before December 31 is a month of free companion travel you are leaving on the table.

The cleanest sequence:

  • November of year zero: Apply for the Performance Business and either the Priority or Premier personal card, on the same day or a day apart so the credit pulls bunch up. Chase typically lets you stack the two if you don't already hold both products.
  • November to early February: Strategically delay your minimum spend so the welcome bonus posts in January or February of the qualifying year. Some cardholders push everything they can onto the cards starting January 1 to make sure the bonus hits in the qualifying year, not the prior one.
  • By February or March of the qualifying year: Welcome bonuses post. Combined with the 10,000 cardholder boost, you cross the threshold.
  • The rest of that year and all of the next: You have a Companion Pass.

Earning it on, say, February 15 in a qualifying year buys you roughly 22 and a half months of pass validity. Earning it on December 1 buys you 13. Same effort, completely different return.

Using the pass once you have it

The mechanics are simple. Log into your Rapid Rewards account, designate a companion, attach them to any new or existing booking. They get a confirmation, a boarding pass, and a seat assignment under the new assigned-seating system.

A few practical notes:

  • The pass works on every fare class and every route Southwest flies, including the international routes to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. It works on award bookings, paid bookings, and the new tiered seat assignments alike.
  • If your companion needs Extra Legroom or Preferred seats under the post-January-2026 assigned-seating model, those seat upgrade fees are still due. The pass covers the fare, not the seat upcharge.
  • Companion bookings are separate reservations linked to yours. If you cancel your flight, your companion's flight cancels with it. If your companion cancels independently, you still fly.
  • You can change your designated companion three times per calendar year, but as noted, you cannot have simultaneous future bookings with two different companions. Plan the swap carefully.

The companion's award fees on international routes are occasionally surprising; a Cancun round trip with the pass might run your companion $80 to $90 in foreign taxes. Still a steal, but not the $11.20 of a domestic flight.

When the Companion Pass is worth chasing

I have seen people contort themselves into knots earning the pass and then realize Southwest doesn't actually fly to where they need to go. So here is the honest cost-benefit framing.

Worth chasing if:

  • You and a regular travel partner take four or more Southwest round trips together in a typical year. At an average $200 ticket, that is $1,600 of value in year one alone, against perhaps $450 in combined annual fees if you keep both cards.
  • You live in a Southwest hub or near one. Denver, Las Vegas, Baltimore, Houston Hobby, Chicago Midway, Dallas Love. Southwest's network is best when one end of your trip is a hub.
  • You have a partner, parent, or kid you take regular weekend trips with. The "I'm going to LA, want to come?" calculus completely changes when their seat is $5.60.
  • You can knock out the welcome-bonus spend without manufacturing it. If you can stack legitimate large purchases (rent if your landlord takes cards, tax payments, an annual insurance bill) into the qualifying window, the dual-card path is almost free.

Skip it if:

  • You fly Southwest occasionally, but mostly use Delta, United, or American. The pass only works on Southwest metal, no partner airlines, no codeshares.
  • Your travel companion is whoever happens to be available that week. The three-companion-changes-per-year rule is real, and the pass loses value if you can't designate one consistent person.
  • You are already at 4 of the 5/24 Chase limit and have higher-priority Chase products you want, like the Sapphire family. Two Southwest cards eat two slots and Chase counts business cards differently depending on the issuer (Chase business cards do not show up on personal credit reports but they do count toward 5/24).
  • You don't fly enough domestically to use the pass more than two or three times a year. The annual fees on the cards alone start to chew through the value at that volume.

A scenario I run for friends: couple, two kids, four annual round trips on Southwest, average $220 per ticket. That is $880 a year of free companion travel for the kid, $1,760 over the pass's typical 22-month window. Subtract $448 in combined annual fees ($299 Performance + $149 Priority) and you net roughly $1,300 in year one before any value from anniversary points and 4x Southwest spending.

A different scenario: solo business traveler, eight Southwest flights a year, no consistent companion. The pass is worthless. Stick with a more flexible travel card and keep your options open.

The 5/24 wrinkle

If you are not familiar with Chase's 5/24 rule, it is the unwritten approval guideline that says if you have opened five or more credit cards from any issuer in the past 24 months, Chase will deny you. Southwest cards fall under this rule. So does almost everything else in Chase's lineup.

Practically: if you are doing a Southwest dual-card play, do it before you apply for any other Chase products, including the Sapphire Preferred or Reserve. Most strategists I respect recommend the Southwest dual-card move early in someone's points-and-miles run, while you still have headroom under 5/24, because the pass's two-year window of value is so disproportionate to the slots it eats.

If you are already at 4 of 5/24, only one Southwest application makes sense, which means the personal-plus-business stack falls apart and the pass becomes much harder to earn through credit-card spend alone in a single calendar year.

A note on the post-2025 changes

A lot of older guides, including the prior version of this article, were written when Southwest still had open seating and a more generous award chart. The 2025 to 2026 changes that affect Companion Pass holders:

  • Open seating ended January 27, 2026. Every flight now has assigned seats with eight boarding groups and three seat tiers (Standard, Preferred, Extra Legroom). Your companion gets a real seat assignment, which is honestly better for couples and families than the old scramble.
  • Award redemption rates shifted to a more dynamic structure, and award flights tend to cost more points than they did under the old fixed-value chart. The pass still works on award bookings; your own points just buy less.
  • The Companion Pass earning threshold itself stayed at 135,000 CPQP, with the 10,000-point cardholder boost added to soften it for cardholders.

None of this meaningfully degrades the Companion Pass's value. The math on free companion travel is still extraordinary, and the pass remains the headline benefit of the entire Rapid Rewards program.

What I'd actually do

If I were starting from zero today, with a partner I travel with regularly and headroom under 5/24, here is the plan.

Apply for the Performance Business and the Priority personal in November or December. Time spend so both bonuses post in January or February of the new year. Use that window to redirect every legitimate large purchase to those cards. Cross 125,000 net CPQP by March at the latest. Designate the partner. Spend the next 22 months booking every domestic trip on Southwest, paying for one ticket, watching the second one cost $11.20.

Year two, decide whether to keep the cards. The Performance's $299 fee is steep but the 4x Southwest earning and 9,000 anniversary points usually justify it for active flyers. The Priority's $149 is easier to swallow. If you don't plan to re-earn the pass, downgrade to a no-fee Plus to keep the Chase relationship without the recurring cost.

Year three, if you still travel together regularly, run the play again. The cycle is repeatable.

That is the play. Go run it.

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