Buddy Pass Rules for Airline Employees: The 2026 Guide

Your cousin at the gate is having a completely different day than you are. He sees a nearly free trip and an adventure story if the flight fills. You see a line of imputed income headed for your W-2, a dress-code paragraph he skimmed, and a policy page that says his behavior travels on your employee file. Same buddy pass, two very different passengers.

That gap is exactly what the existing buddy pass rules coverage misses — nearly every article online is written for the guest, and much of it still describes programs that no longer exist. This guide covers the employee side, verified against airline policy pages, union communications, retiree-organisation republications of company policy, and the tax code itself, in July 2026.

What a buddy pass actually is

Keep one sentence in mind for the rest of this guide: you are not giving away a flight — you are lending your employee file. Everything below is the fine print on that loan.

The 2026 headline: Delta ended buddy passes

The biggest change in years, and most articles still have not caught up. In October 2024 Delta announced it would eliminate buddy passes as an employee benefit. The wind-down: the annual allotment was cut from eight to four passes issued on each employee’s 2025 anniversary date, no passes were allotted after 2025, and buddy-pass allocation ceased entirely on January 1, 2026 — for active employees and retirees alike. Previously issued, unexpired passes remain usable (Delta policy as republished by the SLC Delta Pioneers retiree organisation; trade coverage by PYOK, October 17, 2024). Delta’s stated rationale: only 38% of active employees had issued even one buddy pass over the preceding two years.

What Delta employees get instead: a Secondary Travel Companion — one extra named companion who travels standby at the S3B code, unlimited and unaccompanied, but excluded from confirmed-discount and other-airline (ZED) travel, with imputed taxable income withheld on yield fares; four Fly Confirmed For Less buddy slots per year, which are paid, confirmed, roughly 15%-discounted tickets where the guest must travel in the same booking as the employee or an eligible pass rider; and an increase of high-priority standby days from six to eight per year. If your mental model of Delta pass sharing predates 2025, it is out of date on every line.

Buddy pass rules per airline, employee side (July 2026)

Airline pass policies live on employee portals, so public precision varies — the table marks what is officially documented versus widely reported. Treat Jetnet, Flying Together, and Deltanet as the binding versions.

👉 Swipe horizontally to see the whole table

Two employee-side notes the guest guides never mention. United’s buddy-pass-versus-enrolled-friend election is a real annual decision with a deadline — for 2026 it ran December 4 to 19, 2025 on Flying Together (AFA United MEC) — and the right answer depends on whether your passes go to one regular person (enroll them) or a rotating cast (keep passes). And if you fly for United as working crew, company policy bars you from accompanying your own buddy-pass riders on the same flight while on duty — brief your guests to operate solo.

The tax bill is yours, not your buddy’s

Here is the part no ranking article explains. US tax law excludes standby flights from your taxable income only as a “no-additional-cost service” under Internal Revenue Code 132 — and that exclusion covers you, your spouse, your dependent children, and (for air transportation specifically) your parents, per IRS Publication 15-B. Friends, adult non-dependent children, cousins, and everyone else a buddy pass exists for are not covered. Their flight’s value is taxable compensation — to you.

The valuation rule is precise: for a space-available flight on a commercial carrier, the taxable value is 25% of the actual carrier’s highest unrestricted coach fare in effect for that flight, less whatever the rider paid (26 CFR 1.61-21, the federal fringe-benefit valuation regulation; the flight date, not the pass-issue date, controls). Airlines apply this in payroll: Delta withholds tax on S3B companion travel based on yield fares, and United has reported taxable pass-rider travel through employees’ W-2s since late 2017 (union and retiree-organisation documentation).

The reimbursement ceiling: one dollar over is selling

May your buddy pay you back? Yes — up to a hard ceiling. United’s policy, stated publicly after its 2019 enforcement action, allows riders to reimburse the employee for “taxes, fees and imputed income” and prohibits anything beyond that. One dollar more and you have sold your travel privileges, which every carrier treats as misuse.

The enforcement is not theoretical. In March 2019 United fired more than 35 employees for brokering pass travel — investigators found riders who could not name their sponsoring employee and who had paid $3,500 to $4,000 per person per year for pass access, some enrolled on faked stepparent and domestic-partner paperwork (The Points Guy, March 7, 2019; corroborated by Inc. and Simple Flying). JetBlue’s official standby guide puts the liability chain in writing: rider misconduct can subject the sponsoring crewmember to discipline “including loss or suspension of pass privileges, time off without pay, or separation of employment,” and negative social-media posts by riders can cost the privileges too. Delta’s current policy attaches dollar penalties to overuse of retiree standby allotments — $150 per day exceeded domestically, $300 transoceanic — with suspension or termination of privileges on the table.

A captain’s vetting framework: the podium test

After 32 years of lending my file to other people’s holidays, this is the five-line decision tree I brief before any pass changes hands. Screenshot it for the next time a plus-one from a wedding asks.

Buddy pass rules: employee FAQ

Bottom line

Buddy passes survived 2026 at most carriers, but the era of tossing them around like business cards is over: Delta ended them, United made them an annual strategic election, and the IRS has always priced them at 25% of full coach — on your paycheck. Share them like the captain you are: vet the rider, brief the rules, cap the money at taxes-fees-imputed, and keep a fallback plan. Your cousin gets the adventure. You keep the file clean.

Disclosure: AirlineCrewDiscount.net earns affiliate commission on selected partner links, at no extra cost to you. Pass-travel policies and tax rules may change; statements above were verified against official and union sources in July 2026, and your airline’s employee portal is always the binding source. You book or buy from third parties under their own terms.