Cents Per Point: Is a Point Auction Worth the Bid?
To work out cents per point on a point auction bid, divide the cash you would genuinely have paid for the same experience by the points the bid would cost you, then multiply by 100. A bid is worth making only when that number still clears what your points are ordinarily worth, and the honest version of the cash number is almost always smaller than the first one you reach for.
The formula
cents per point = (your cash comparator / points bid) x 100
Your cash comparator is what the same seats, the same stay or the same table would have cost you in money at a price you would actually have paid. It is not the sticker value printed on a hospitality package, not a resale peak, and not the value of anything bundled in that you would have skipped.
The comparator is where cpp math goes wrong. The number you put on top of the fraction drives the whole answer, so it is easy to talk yourself into a brilliant cpp by quoting the most optimistic ticket price you can find. Be conservative, and subtract anything you would never have paid for out of pocket.
We do not publish a cash value for any lot, and we never turn a closing bid into dollars and call that the lot's worth. We publish what lots closed at in points. The cash side stays yours, because it is the only half of the fraction that depends on you.
So is the bid worth it? One example, end to end
The numbers in this example are invented to show the arithmetic. None of them come from our archive, and none of them describe a real lot.
Say a Marriott Bonvoy auction is sitting at 50,000 points for a pair of seats you can price elsewhere. Before looking at the bid again, you decide you would genuinely have paid $400 of your own money for those seats. That is your comparator: 400 divided by 50,000 is 0.008, times 100 is 0.8 cents per point. Marriott's published baseline in the table below is 0.75 cents, so the bid clears it, narrowly. Let the same lot run to 60,000 points and the same comparator gives 0.67 cents, and the answer flips.
Two things follow from that. The only number in the whole check that is yours to choose is the $400, which is why an inflated comparator can make any bid look like a win. And the answer moves every time the bid moves, so the useful moment to run the math is before you enter a maximum, not after you have been outbid.
Four real closes to run the check against
Every close below is a verified final in our archive: the program confirmed the winning bid after the lot ended. We publish what each one closed at in points and stop there. The cash half is yours to supply, and these four are worth walking because each one changes the answer for a different reason.
The same seats, two prices. Six separate Suite Seats for Hilary Duff at The O2 packages closed on August 31, 2026, and all six opened at 30,000 Marriott points. Package 1 sold for 42,500 Marriott points after six bids. Package 3 sold for 30,000 Marriott points on a single bid, and so did packages 2, 4, 5 and 6. Same suite, same night, 42% apart on price. If those seats would have cost you $X in cash, the check on package 1 is X divided by 42,500, times 100, and on each single-bid package it is X divided by 30,000: one comparator, two answers, 42% apart on nothing but who else showed up.
A low baseline flatters a big number. The Ultimate Broadway Experience: WICKED The Musical sold for 310,000 Hilton Honors points. That looks enormous beside the Marriott lots, but Hilton's median verified close of 260,000 points says it is ordinary for the program, and Hilton Honors carries the lowest published valuation in the table below. A six-figure points number is not automatically a bad buy and a five-figure one is not automatically a good one: the denominator only means something once you divide your own comparator by it and compare against that currency's baseline.
Two similar lots, four times apart. Houston vs. Texas Tech | September 19, 2026 (2 passes) sold for 20,000 Choice points after two bids. South Carolina vs. Alabama | September 26, 2026 (2 passes) sold for 85,000 Choice points, also after two bids. Same program, same format, one week apart, and the matchup did all the work. Divide the same comparator by 20,000 and by 85,000 and the first cpp is more than four times the second, which is the reason to run the check on a lot rather than on a program.
The trophy lot. VIP Experience + Hotel Stay - Inter Miami CF sold for 1,523,500 Marriott points after 43 bids. A denominator that large needs a very large comparator on top of it before the arithmetic clears an ordinary Marriott redemption, and this is exactly the class of lot where a cash number you can defend is hardest to find.
What counts as good, by program
A cpp is only good or bad against what the same points would have returned on an ordinary redemption. These are the published baselines for the programs whose auctions we track most closely:
| Program | Published valuation (TPG, September 2026) |
|---|---|
| Marriott Bonvoy | 0.75 cents per point |
| Hilton Honors | 0.4 cents per point |
| Wyndham Rewards | 0.7 cents per point |
| Choice Privileges | 0.85 cents per point |
| World of Hyatt | 1.65 cents per point |
| IHG One Rewards | 0.6 cents per point |
| United MileagePlus | 1.2 cents per mile |
| Delta SkyMiles | 1.2 cents per mile |
| Alaska Atmos Rewards | 1.55 cents per mile |
A second opinion is worth having, because these numbers are estimates rather than exchange rates. NerdWallet's August 2026 valuations put Hilton Honors at the same 0.4 cents and World of Hyatt a little higher, at 1.8 cents against The Points Guy's 1.65. Each outlet builds its figure from its own redemption sample and its own commercial context, and every one of them moves when a program devalues. Treat the column as a sanity check, and if you reliably get more out of a currency than the table says, use your own number instead.
Two programs work differently enough to have their own posts. Accor ALL puts a fixed floor under every point, which turns the whole question into one subtraction: see the Accor ALL points arbitrage calculator. Capital One prices its own entertainment redemptions at a fixed rate, which is a useful case study in a baseline you cannot argue with: see the Capital One 0.8 cent trap.
When a lot has no cash equivalent
Plenty of this inventory is not sold anywhere else at any price. A suite with a host, a pre-game field visit, a backstage meet and greet: there is no ticket you can put in a cart to price it, so the top of the fraction has nothing obvious to go in it.
Two honest ways forward. The first is to price the nearest purchasable equivalent and build the comparator out of the parts you can actually buy: the hotel night at its cash rate, a standard seat in the same section, the dinner at menu prices. Whatever is left over is the premium you are choosing to pay for access, and naming it as a premium keeps it out of the numerator. The second is to admit the lot has no comparator at all, stop pretending the math applies, and decide on whether you want it, at a points number you are willing to lose. Both are defensible. Reaching for the program's own sticker value because it is the only figure on the page is not. The Capital One 0.8 cent trap walks a decision tree for this exact fork, and it applies well beyond Capital One.
When to walk away
A number you are not willing to act on is not a check. Three patterns are worth knowing before you set a maximum.
Boring lots beat trophy lots. Of the 2,914 trusted closes in our archive that carry a bid count, 36.9% drew fewer than five bids as of September 2026. Those quiet lots are where a comparator you can defend actually clears the baseline. The marquee lot with 43 bidders is priced by the person in the room who wants it most, and that is rarely you. There is a fuller breakdown of where the quiet corners sit in our guide to point auctions that draw fewer than five bids.
An uncontested lot can be sitting next to a contested one. The Hilary Duff packages above were the same seats on the same night, and five of the six sold at the 30,000-point opening bid while the sixth drew six bidders. Before you bid on the lot at the top of the page, check whether the program listed the identical experience two or three more times further down.
Set the maximum before you look at the current bid. Work out the highest points number that still clears your baseline, enter it once, and leave it. A maximum you recalculate while the clock is running is not a maximum, it is a mood. If the lot passes that number, the walk-away is the win: your points keep their ordinary value, which was the whole point of running the math.
Run the check before you bid
1. Find the lot in our live point auction listings and note the current bid or the Buy It Now price.
2. Write down your cash comparator, conservatively, before you look at anything else.
3. Divide the comparator by the points, then multiply by 100.
4. Compare that against your program's baseline above.
5. Check the PointAuctions.com closed-auction archive for what comparable lots actually cleared at, then set your maximum and stop.
New to all of this? Start with how point auctions work. If you want the clearing prices behind every baseline here, we keep a running read of what closed point auctions reveal about each program.