Aeroplan

Elite tiers

50K confers Star Alliance Gold — the lowest tier in this programme with alliance-wide lounge access. Alliance mapping last verified 4 August 2026. Conditions beyond the threshold: Partner/Star Alliance SQC (1 per 5 base points) is capped at 25,000 per year — partner flying alone cannot reach 50K.; Credit-card SQC contributions are also capped at 25,000 per year (not modelled).. Compare lounge access across programmes →

Qualifies on SQC within a calendar year: own metal earns 4 SQC/$1 on Flex fares and above, 2 on Standard, 0 on Basic — re-confirmed word for word on Air Canada's status page, Aug 2026. Status earned in a calendar year runs to the end of the FOLLOWING calendar year. Partner and Star Alliance flights earn 1 SQC per 5 Aeroplan base points, hard-capped at 25,000 SQC/year — and that ceiling is not a flight-only one: it is POOLED with more than forty travel and everyday earning partners, so partner flying alone cannot reach 50K, the first Star Alliance Gold tier, and everyday spend cannot top it up past the same 25,000. Two further lanes exist and are disclosed rather than modelled: Everyday Status Qualification reaches 25K on 100,000 Everyday Status Qualifying miles (25K only, and without Milestone Benefits), and Aeroplan co-brand cards earn 1,000 SQC per CAD 5,000 on premium cards or per CAD 20,000 on core cards, under a combined 25,000-a-year cap, from Canadian and US issuers only. NOT MODELLED, and it matters: that capped conversion applies only to tickets issued by another airline. A Star Alliance partner flight on an Air Canada-issued (014) ticket earns the UNCAPPED spend rate instead — 2 SQC/$1 in Economy Standard, 4 on Flex and above — so this calculator understates SQC on Air Canada-ticketed partner flying. Lifetime Qualifying Miles (not modelled) accrue at 100% of distance in Economy excluding Basic, 125% in Premium Economy and 150% in Business, both including Basic, on cash fares on Air Canada metal. The rate is treated as per CANADIAN dollar, but that is our inference and not Air Canada’s statement: the status page writes an unqualified dollar sign throughout and never names a currency — the strings CAD and USD appear nowhere on it. Aeroplan is a Canadian programme and the figure is identical on the Canadian and US versions of the page rather than localised, which points to one fixed currency; a fare entered in anything else is converted at a dated reference rate, so this figure may differ from what posts to your account. Air Canada's own FX answer (earn FAQ, 31 Aug 2026) converts foreign-currency tickets to Canadian dollars at an industry-standard rate — but it states that rule for POINTS, and the page's only SQC mentions are an unrelated Flight Pass exclusion, so its extension to SQC remains our inference. The same FAQ confirms the spend basis switched from distance at the 2025/26 boundary, keyed on each segment's DEPARTURE date — the spend model here is the post-boundary one. NO SENTENCE ABOUT KEEPING STATUS WAS FOUND on either Aeroplan status page, Canadian or US, when both were read in full (capture Y adjudication, 11 Sep 2026): every ‘keep’ and ‘requalify’ sentence on them attaches to the co-brand credit-card spend alternative, which is out of scope here. The calendar-year sentence above is about how long status LASTS, not a bar to renew it, so no renewal threshold — lower or the same — is encoded for any Aeroplan rung.

Reaching this status

Aeroplan publishes conditions that sit alongside the SQC threshold, so reaching the number on its own does not confer the tier. They are shown here and never scored — the Lark Score measures SQC earned and nothing else. Where the published wording says more than the summary line, the wording governs.

Earning reference

Aeroplan status matches out