For most of the last decade, Australian loyalty programs competed on scale. More partners, more data, more personalisation, and eventually AI. The 14th edition of Adam Posner's For Love or Money study, subtitled The Impact Edition, says members have quietly moved on from that arms race. They are rewarding the programs that deliver clear, tangible value, and trimming the rest.

If you run a program, the 2026 findings read less like a leaderboard and more like a brief. Here is what the data says, who is winning, and why.

Australians aren't joining more. They're choosing harder.

93% of Australians belong to at least one loyalty program, the highest penetration the study has recorded. Saturation is the starting point, not the opportunity. Asked unprompted, members name just 3.8 programs each, among the lowest averages in the study's history. Prompted against a list of 131 programs, that jumps to 10.1. People belong to plenty and actively care about a few.

Activity is steady at 50% of members active across all their programs, but the generational split is the real signal. Gen Y active participation rose to 54%, while Gen Z fell to 40% and is leading a roughly 30% drop in memberships over five years. The next generation of spenders is the most ruthless about what earns a place in their wallet.

The programs still matter to the brands that run them. 77% of members say loyalty improves their overall brand experience, up from 68% in 2018, and 78% say their behaviour would change if a program they belong to shut down, up from 65% in 2017. The stakes of getting it right have risen, not fallen.

The 2026 ranking: value wins, and it's mostly paid

Posner's Loyalty Program Experience Index (SPVX) rates 77 programs on how Simple, Personal and Valuable members find them. Members weighted those three at Simple 24%, Personal 11%, and Valuable 65%, so the index is dominated by perceived value. The 2026 average is 71.9 out of 100. The top 10:

#ProgramSPVXPaid / subscription1Woolworths Everyday Extra83.2Yes2Amazon Prime83.1Yes3OnePass81.9Yes4American Express Membership Rewards81.3Yes5Flybuys80.9No6Woolworths Everyday Rewards80.8No7Coles Plus80.7Yes8eBay Plus80.1Yes9NAB Rewards78.9Yes10ANZ Rewards78.0Yes

Source: For Love or Money 2026, The Point of Loyalty. SPVX scored for programs held by more than 3% of the sample.

Two things jump out. Flybuys, long the benchmark, sits at fifth. And eight of the top 10 are paid or subscription programs. Only Flybuys and Everyday Rewards crack the leaderboard without a fee attached. That is the headline of the year.

What's working

Subscriptions that pay for themselves. Everyday Extra, Amazon Prime, OnePass and Coles Plus all ask members to pay, then make the return obvious: free delivery, member pricing, bonus points, perks that recoup the fee in a few shops. Paying members are more committed and actively seek the value they have bought. Since value carries 65% of the index, programs that turn a fee into legible, recurring payback score highest.

High-frequency value. Programs tied to everyday purchases give members more chances to feel the benefit. A small win every week beats a large reward sitting over the horizon.

Simplicity, still. Flybuys slipped but stayed top five on the strength of being easy to use and reliably worth it. As Posner puts it, you cannot have a valuable program that is also complex and impersonal. The three variables only work together.

What's not working

Data rich, relevance poor. This is the sharpest finding in the report. 63% of members believe programs already hold enough data to know them well, yet only 40% say the offers they get are actually personalised and relevant. The gap is not data availability. It is relevance activation. And bad personalisation backfires: members flag offers that feel invasive, too frequent, too generic, or simply irrelevant.

The emotional-relationship assumption, oversold. The industry spent years assuming customers wanted a deeper bond. The 2026 data is blunter. 30% of members say they would be less engaged with a program that stripped out financial rewards. Money is the floor. Programs that skipped it and led with sentiment got the order wrong.

Money earns the visit. Belief and belonging earn the next ten.

Here is the part worth dwelling on, because it reframes what "best" means. Posner splits loyalty into three pillars and, for the first time, scores a program's impact across all three: Behaviour (decision, spend, frequency, share of wallet), Belief (trust, recommendation, reviews, love) and Belonging (community, purpose, feeling valued).

Financial value drives the first pillar. It is also the easiest thing on earth for a competitor to copy. A better discount is always one promo away. What is hard to copy is the second and third: trust, advocacy, reviews, a sense of community. Those are what turn a member who comes back into a member who brings others.

This is the line we draw at TrueLoyal. A rewards program is built to move behaviour and deliver the financial value members now treat as table stakes. A Fan Club™ is built for belief and belonging: it turns your most engaged customers into a community that recommends you, creates content, and writes the reviews our AI Review Summaries surface on the product page. Engagement, influence and trust are not soft ideals. Structured correctly, they are the infrastructure that drives profitable repeat behaviour at scale, and the 70% of members who say they would stay engaged across non-financial rewards are telling you the second layer is real.

A word on AI and agentic commerce

Only 23% of members are comfortable letting an AI agent handle their shopping. 52% are concerned, and among Baby Boomers comfort drops to 8%. There is genuine appetite for AI that quietly improves the experience, through better recommendations and faster service, but very little for AI that spends money on a member's behalf. Treat agentic commerce as a trust-building project, not a launch headline.

What to do with this

1. Make the value legible. A member should explain what they get in one sentence. If they cannot, simplify before adding anything.
2. Earn the fee before you charge it. Model the breakeven from the member's seat, not yours.
3. Fix relevance, not data volume. You almost certainly have enough data. The work is activating it, and killing the offers that feel invasive or generic.
4. Build belief and belonging on purpose. Reviews, recommendations, community and trust are not by-products. They are your moat.
5. Sequence AI behind trust. Use it to improve the experience now. Hold agentic features until members are ready.

The question for 2026 is not whether members still want loyalty programs. They clearly do. It is whether yours is built to earn the next ten visits, or just the next one.

Data from For Love or Money 2026, The Impact Edition, the 14th annual Australian edition of Adam Posner's customer loyalty study (The Point of Loyalty), fielded Q1 2026 by First Point Research and Consulting, N=1002.