Status Lark

How Status Lark Calculates Earning

Status Lark estimates how much status currency — Tier Points, Status Credits, Loyalty Points and the equivalents — a given flight will earn in a frequent flyer programme across the Oneworld, SkyTeam and Star Alliance networks. This page explains where our figures come from, how the calculation works, and how we keep them current. We publish this in full because trusting an estimate means understanding how it was produced.

Our figures are estimates

Every number on this site is an estimate. Airline earning rules are intricate, change without much notice, and often depend on the exact fare you buy rather than the cabin you see when booking. We model them as faithfully as we can, but we are not the airline. Always confirm against the official programme before booking a flight for status. Each programme page links to the airline's own earning page for exactly this reason.

Data sources

Our estimates are built from two layers:

A structured earning model — a database of programme earning rules, status-currency zones by distance, codeshare class mappings and ticketed-point-mileage (TPM) overrides for major routes. This is maintained by hand against published airline documentation.
Airport and distance data — airport coordinates from the public-domain OurAirports dataset. Where an airline publishes a specific TPM for a route, we use that; otherwise we calculate the great-circle distance between the two airports using the Haversine formula.

How the calculation works

For a given route, programme, cabin and booking class, the calculator:

Determines the flight distance (TPM override if available, else great-circle distance).
Looks up the earning rule for that programme, marketing/operating carrier and booking class.
Applies the rule — a per-distance rate, a fixed amount per distance zone, a per-spend rate, or a combination — including any fare-brand multiplier.
Returns the estimated status currency earned.

The same calculation module powers both the interactive calculator and the figures shown on our route and guide pages, so the two never disagree.

Rounding

Where a rule produces a fraction — a percentage of distance, a per-currency rate — we round to a whole unit of the status currency. Most airlines do not publish a rounding rule at all: Korean Air and SAS are two of many that state a percentage and never say what happens to the remainder. Where the airline is silent we round half up, and that is our convention rather than theirs, so a figure may sit a point either side of what the airline's own statement shows. Where an airline does publish a rule — a per-flight minimum, a per-segment floor, a cap — we apply the published rule instead.

A note on distance

Where a distance-based rule applies and we hold no published mileage for the route, the great-circle distance is what the rule multiplies — and airlines' own mileage tables do not always agree with it. Most published mileages sit within half a per cent of great circle, but some routes are table figures rather than computed distances: British Airways, for example, rates London–Tokyo (Haneda and Narita alike) at 6,222 miles where great-circle is about 5,974 — consistent with a routing that avoids Russian airspace — so a partner sector credited to a BA-style percentage-of-miles rule can show slightly fewer points here than the airline's own calculator reports on those routes. The mechanism and percentages match; the distance basis is the difference. The strongest published version of this is Delta's, which credits MQD on partner flights by "distance flown as determined by Delta in its sole discretion" — an explicit statement that the airline's own figure governs, whatever a distance calculation produces. Where we capture an airline's published mileage for a route we use it, and we extend that coverage over time.

Provenance grades, and where a figure is below chart grade

Most of our earning rules are transcribed directly from an airline's own published chart or calculator. A minority rest on weaker evidence, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. As of the August 2026 full-programme audit, the figures below primary-chart grade are: Ethiopian's own-flight percentages (the class groupings are Ethiopian's own; the percentage values come from corroborating industry data because Ethiopian gates its table behind an interactive calculator); EgyptAir partner-flight status treatment (inferred from EgyptAir's published statement that tier level is indicated by flown miles alone); the per-flight caps on United's newest partner rules (pattern-inferred from United's established cap structure, not published per partner); Air Europa's partner scales (single-pass reads of each partner page); Royal Jordanian and Royal Air Maroc partner rates (read from those airlines' own mileage calculators — Royal Air Maroc's answers only at cabin level); Copa's seven routes where Avianca flights briefly earn qualifying miles one-for-one (disclosed here because our model applies Copa's general half-rate everywhere); and Aeroplan's Star Alliance partner grid (Air Canada publishes no per-carrier chart, so we apply its published conversion of one Status Qualifying Credit per five base points to a documented per-cabin accrual model — which means the same rate stands for every Star Alliance carrier until a per-carrier chart is published). Each of these carries its full provenance note in the data itself.

Last-verified policy

We treat earning data as something that decays, and we date our checks rather than our pages. Every figure carries the date it was last read against the airline's own source in the data layer itself, alongside the capture log that recorded the read; those logs are what the review schedule works from, so a rate that has not been re-checked within its set period is flagged and corrected rather than quietly ageing. Where a date is decision-relevant we show it: a programme page states when its alliance-tier mapping was last verified, a status-match offer states when its terms were last checked, and a converted spend rate states the date of the exchange rate used. Where we know a figure is estimated rather than confirmed — or where an airline publishes nothing and we have modelled it — we say so on the page, in the section above and in the note attached to the figure.

We deliberately do not stamp a single "last verified" date across a whole page. A programme page draws on dozens of separately-dated readings, and one date over all of them would be either the oldest (misleadingly stale) or the newest (misleadingly fresh).

The resulting dataset — every earning rule, tier threshold and status-match edge, independently verified on the dates shown — is proprietary to Status Lark and protected by database right. It is available for licensing: contact [email protected].

What we deliberately do not do

We do not set cookies, run third-party trackers, or collect personal information to produce these estimates. The calculator runs on data you enter and returns a result — nothing is stored about you. See our privacy policy for detail.