The 30-day expiry email is a deadline, not a notification

Referral rewards expire, and Tesla sends a 30-day warning before they do. Filed with the rest of the marketing mail, it looks like a notification. It is the last useful prompt you will get before a balance stops existing.

What the deadline is measured from

Not the email. Every clock runs from the Grant Date — the day Tesla posted the benefit to the account, which is also the day a pending referral stopped being pending:

• Tesla Credits: 12 months from the Grant Date.
• Supercharging miles or kilometres: 6 months from the Grant Date.

So the warning email arrives at month eleven for credits and month five for charging distance. If you hold both, you get two warnings on different schedules for the same referral.

Option 1 — spend it, accepting that redemption is final

Credits are redeemed through the Loot Box in the Tesla app, and redemptions are final: there is no return path on a redeemed item. Thirty days is enough time to choose deliberately and not enough to keep deferring. What is actually on offer varies, and one category is genuinely disputed between sources — whether Tesla Shop merchandise is redeemable — so the answer is whatever your own Loot Box lists today.

Option 2 — extend the whole balance by earning again

The only mechanism that moves a deadline. A further successful referral inside the window extends all credits in the account to 12 months from the newest Grant Date. A referrer with one order in the pipeline may find the expiry problem solves itself; a referrer with none should treat the email as final. And the cap still applies: only the first ten successful referrals in a calendar year pay anything at all.

Option 3 — charging distance: drive it down

A charging allowance cannot be converted, transferred or cashed out. It is consumed automatically at the stall, before any payment method is touched, and the only way to use it is to charge. Six months is a comfortable window for someone who cannot charge at home and a real constraint for a suburban owner with a wallbox — which is why, at the five-month mark, routing a long trip through Superchargers instead of charging at home is a rational thing to do once.

What the email cannot do

It cannot extend anything by itself, and support cannot reissue an expired balance: credits are documented as non-reissuable. There is no grace period to appeal to. That is the whole reason to treat the email as a deadline the day it arrives rather than a reminder to file.

If you are a buyer rather than a referrer

None of this applies to you. The buyer benefit — 3 months of FSD (Supervised) in North America — attaches at checkout and is used or not used inside its own trial window; there are no credits to expire. The trial's own end date is the thing to diary, because the subscription it turns into is $99 a month.

Related: what the Loot Box will let you spend credits on, and the three dates a referrer tracks.