I’m surprised more people don’t learn how to get a Southwest Companion Pass because it is such a great deal compared to other airline perks. By allowing me to take one of my kids or my spouse along for (nearly) free every time I fly, my Companion Pass saves me more than a thousand dollars every year!
I think what holds people back is the impression that you have to either fly all the time, or charge many thousands of dollars on a Southwest credit card to earn it.
This post will show you how to earn Southwest Companion Pass much quicker, with moderate spending!
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. So if you click through and make a purchase or sign up, I could receive a small commission or bonus points, at no extra cost to you!
Through July 1, 2026, Southwest is offering bigger signup bonuses than usual!
Sign up for a Rapid Rewards Plus Credit card and get 50,000 Rapid Rewards points.
Sign up for a Rapid Rewards Premier Credit card and get 55,000 Rapid Rewards points.
Sign up for a Rapid Rewards Priority Credit card and get 60,000 Rapid Rewards points.
To earn the signup bonus, you have to spend a minimum amount on the card in the first 3 months. Disclosure: If you sign up through one of these links, I could earn a points bonus!
How to get a Southwest Companion Pass fast
The easiest and fastest way to earn the Companion Pass is through credit card signup bonuses. And yes, you can do this for multiple years. Many of us cancel our Southwest cards every few years in order to re-apply and earn a new sign-up bonus.
If you play your cards right, you can earn a Southwest Companion Pass for nearly two years at a time. (For even more details, check out this post I wrote on the Point.me blog about the Companion Pass.)
But doesn’t opening and closing credit cards trash your credit score? Nope. Read the full explaination in my post on how playing the credit card game doesn’t hurt your credit score.
The requirements for getting a Southwest Companion Pass
To earn a Companion Pass, you need to accrue 135,000 companion qualifying points within a calendar year. People typically earn these points by flying or by spending around $100k on a Southwest credit card. (You typically get 1 point per dollar spent, but there are bonuses that will help you boost that up to 135k points by the time you’ve spent $100k.)
But there is a faster way to get that Southwest Companion Pass!
And here’s why faster is important: When you earn the Companion Pass, you get it for the remainder of the current calendar year in addition to the next year. So you don’t want to work on earning the pass all year, just to get it in December. You want to earn that pass in January, so you can use it all that year and all the following year!
Scenario 1: Earning a Companion Pass when you don’t currently have a Southwest card
This is the easiest scenario for getting your Southwest Companion Pass fast. I’ll call it, Business/Personal:
- Apply for a Business Southwest credit card: 60,000-80,000 points. Southwest offers two business cards. One, Premier Business, usually offers a 60,000-point signup bonus (after you spend $3,000 in the first three months). But sometimes they bump it up to 80k points. The other, Performance Business, offers an 80,000-point bonus with the same requirement. Sometimes they bump that one up to 100k points.
But what if you’re not a business owner? Fortunately, Chase appears to have a broad definition of what business is, for the purposes of getting this credit card. When applying, you will be asked what your business does. My business is freelance writing (and writing this blog), so I put that and was immediately approved. According to other applicants who shared their experience online, if you occasionally sell items on eBay, that can be your business.
I’m not advocating that you lie on your credit card application. But it seems like most people can come up with something they do that could qualify as a business for the purpose of getting this card.
Remember, you need 135,000 points to get a Southwest Companion Pass. So if you get the 60,000 or 80,000 signup bonus for a business card, you’re nearly or more than halfway there! - Wait 30 days. You’re more likely to get approved for the next card you apply for if you wait a while. Use this time to make some charges on your first credit card to work toward that minimum spend.
- Apply for a personal Southwest credit card: 50,000-60,000 points. That’s the typical signup bonus if you get one of the three Southwest personal cards and meet the minimum spend within the first few months (currently between $1,000 to $3,000 points).
Note! Sometimes Southwest offers more points.
Once you hit the minimum spend for both cards, you should have at least this many points:
60,000 Premier Business card sign-up bonus (SUB)
+
3,000 points for spending on the business card
+
50,000 personal card SUB
+
3,000 for spending on the personal card
116,000 points
So, the SUBs and spending get you 116,000/135,000 points. But you’re actually even closer than that! That’s because Southwest gives all credit card holders a 10,000-point bonus toward the Companion Pass. So if you followed these steps, you would now have 126,000/135,000. So close!
How to get those last 9,000 points:
- Spending. You can earn 9,000 points by charging $9,000 (or a little less, with bonus points) on one of your new credit cards.
- Referral bonuses. You can earn 20,000 points (current offer) by referring a friend (or your spouse!) for a Southwest card. Just go to Chase’s Refer-a-Friend site and fill in your information to get a custom link.
- Southwest Hotels. You can earn 1 point per dollar spent — plus bonuses that can be huge — by booking lodging through Southwest Hotels.
- Shopping. Head to Rapid Rewards Shopping to click through to all the regular stores you probably already shop at. Often the reward is one point per dollar, but sometimes companies offer bonuses. I recently earned 1,400 for spending $15 to sign up for AARP.
- Other Southwest partners. You can add a few more miles by filling out surveys at Rewards for Opinions, registering your credit card with Rapid Rewards Dining or renting cars through the Southwest site.
- Flying. Of course, you can always earn points the old-fashioned way, by paying for Southwest Airlines flights with cash.
How to get a Companion Pass if you already have a Southwest credit card
You can still use the sign-up bonus method for a quick Companion Pass if you already hold a Southwest card! But you are limited to one signup bonus for a personal card every 24 months. A new rule says that you can only get one bonus for each Southwest Business card ever. Once per lifetime. Ugh.
If you currently hold a personal Southwest card, you will have to cancel that card before applying for a new one. This is because Southwest will only award you a signup bonus for a personal card if you don’t already hold one.
Here are the steps you should go through if you want to use the two-card bonus method, but you already have a personal Southwest card:
- Cancel your personal Southwest credit card.
- Wait one month.
- Apply for a new Southwest credit card and make the minimum spend.
The rest of the steps are the same as the previous section: Once you meet the minimum spend for your personal card and go through the same with a business card, you’ll have earned the Companion Pass, or you’ll be real close.
If you already hold a business card when you start this process, good news! You don’t need to cancel it. You can apply for Southwest’s other business card in addition to the one you already have, and apply for a personal one as well. That means, if you already hold the Premier Business card, you can apply for the Performance Business card as well — or vice versa. And you should receive the signup bonus for that new business card.
Sign-up bonuses fluctuate throughout the year
When you go to sign up for a Southwest credit card, you might see a signup bonus offer that differs from the ones I described here. Sometimes Southwest offers higher bonuses, which would help you get your Companion Pass even quicker.
About once a year, Southwest offers the chance to earn a “promotional” Companion Pass that doesn’t last as long as the regular pass.
When to start working on earning a Southwest Companion Pass
Remember, you have to earn all 135,000 points in the same calendar year to get a Companion Pass. It doesn’t matter how many total points you have, or how many you earned last year! The first day to start counting points for a 2026-27 pass was Jan. 1, 2026. The first day to start counting points for a 2027-28 pass will be Jan. 1, 2027.
However, that doesn’t mean you have to wait until January to start the process. The ideal time to start working on your Companion Pass is November or December. This gives you time to get approved for the first credit card and even start spending toward the sign-up bonus.
But be careful! You do not want that bonus to hit your account before Jan. 1. In fact, avoid getting even close to the signup bonus. Sometimes, you get more points than you were expecting for spending. If the signup bonus is credited to your account on Dec. 31, it will not count for a Companion Pass you’re trying to earn in the next calendar year. You would have to start all over again!
A frequently-recommended schedule goes like this:
Nov. 1: Apply for your first Southwest credit card. (Either business or consumer.)
November-December: Spend around 2/3 or less of the minimum spend required to get the sign-up bonus on that card. So if you have a $3,000 minimum spend, you could safely spend $1,500 or up to $2,500 by the end of December.
Dec. 1: Apply for the second credit card. If you applied for the business card first, now it’s time to apply for one of the consumer cards, or vice versa. Again, spend around 2/3 or less of the minimum spend.
January: Charge the rest of the minimum spend to receive the first signup bonus. Then switch to the second card and do the same.
Using this method, you might get your Southwest Companion Pass by February or even the end of January, giving you up to 23 months of buy-one-get-one free flights!
How my husband got the Southwest Companion Pass quickly
How do I know it works? Because I used a similar process to get my husband’s Companion Pass. He already had a personal Southwest credit card when we started, and we chose not to cancel that. Instead, his path to Companion Pass included one new Business card, a referral bonus, a hotel stay and some heavy holiday spending.
Here’s how my husband received his Companion Pass by early March 2025:
- He applied for the 80,000-point business card in December 2024. (His business is selling his original art prints.)
- He started spending on the business card in December. But he made sure not to hit the $5,000 minimum for the SUB until after our last statement of the year closed. (Once that statement closes, all charges you make will credit during the next calendar year.)
- Also in December, once his last statement of the year closed on his existing Southwest personal card, we we started putting all our household expenses on that.
- On Dec. 30, our family stayed in a hotel room I had booked through Southwest Hotels in Erik’s name.
- On Dec. 31, 2024 [after his last 2024 statement had already closed] he finished charging $5,000 to the business card and put it away in a drawer.
- On January 1, 2025, Southwest credited him with 10,000 bonus points for being a credit card holder. He now had 10,000 out of the 135,000 points he needed to earn in 2025 toward the Companion Pass.
- Also on Jan. 1, 2025, his personal card statement closed, and he was awarded 5,000 points for spending. (1 point per dollar spent.) He now had 15,000/135,000 points toward the Companion Pass.
- On Jan. 5, 2025, his business card statement closed. Because he had completed the $5,000 minimum spend, he received his 80,000 points signup bonus. He also got an additional 5,000 points: 1 for every dollar he spent. He now had 100,000/135,000 points.
- In early January, he sent me a Refer-a-Friend link and I applied for a business card of my own.
- In January, he joined Rewards for Opinions and completed five surveys, which gave him a 500-point signup bonus, plus a 500-point bonus for completing five surveys. Including the bonus points and the points for each survey, he got about 2,000 points from surveys. He now had 102,000/135,000 points.
- On Jan. 13, he received the 2,000 point bonus for our Dec. 30 hotel stay. He now had 104,000/135,000 points.
12. On February 1, his personal card statement closed. He received 20,000 points for referring me for the business card, plus 7,000 points for our personal spending. He now had 131,000/135,000 points.
13. On March 2, his personal credit card statement closed. He received 4,500 points for spending. He then had 135,500/135,000 points!
Soon after, he received a congratulatory email from Southwest, and the Companion Pass appeared on his account.
How much does it cost to use the quick method to get a Southwest Companion Pass?
Your main expenses for getting a Southwest Companion Pass using the signup bonus method are:
- Credit card annual fees
- Spending
You could spend more, booking hotels, shopping on the Rapid Rewards portal, etc. But the only two things you absolutely need to spend to get a Companion Pass are those first two.
The current annual fees for the various Southwest credit cards range from $99 to $299. (If you don’t want to keep the cards longterm, you can always cancel them before the fee hits for the second year.) For the two-card method with one business card and one personal card, you’ll pay around $400 in fees.
In terms of spending, you need to charge about $6,000 to $8,000 on credit cards to make this work. So this system works best for people who already have relatively high household spending or a small business.
Don’t try this system if it means spending more money than you can pay off each month! If you end up paying interest, you won’t benefit financially.
All the Southwest credit cards cards come with benefits that I feel are worth the fees. (Check out my post about how the changes at Southwest Airlines in 2026 make the credit card benefits more valuable than ever!)
For example, the Performance Business card, ($299 fee) comes with a $120 statement credit to cover the cost of Global Entry. And all the Southwest credit cards allow the cardmember to check a bag free, a $45 savings every time you fly.
Even if the cards didn’t pay for themselves, to me it is worth it to pay $400 or more to earn a Southwest Companion Pass! That small investment saves me about $1,500 every year in free flights!
Do you have questions about how to get a Southwest Companion Pass or how to use this amazing benefit one you’ve got it? Let me know in the comments!
How I use my Southwest Companion Pass
Many couples use their Companion Pass to travel together, with the wife or husband being the companion. But I use my Companion Pass most for my three kids, who are teens and young adults.
Some of the ways the Southwest Companion Pass saves us money:
- Taking a kid to college or home from college as my free companion.
- The companion pass makes college tours much more affordable.
- Taking a one-on-one trip with one of my kids.
- Reducing the cost of family vacations. When we fly to Cancun for our post-holiday trip, we will have five people flying but we will only have to buy three tickets.
- Get-aways with friends. Because you can change your companion three times a year, I’m switching my companion to a friend in September for a single flight — a moms’ trip to Disneyland.
Do you enjoy learning Southwest Airlines tips and tricks? Check out my post on how to stop your Southwest flight credits from expiring!