What happens to your Discovery Miles when you leave

If you hold Discovery Miles, the rules for losing them live mainly on two pages of the current Discovery Miles terms and conditions — the document dated 1 July 2026, captured by this registry on 21 July 2026 (discovery-card-miles-terms-and-conditions.pdf on Discovery Bank’s document server, also served byte-identically as discovery-miles-bank-benefit-guide.pdf under three tabs of the Vitality product-rules page). This essay walks through what those pages say, quoting each rule exactly as the document states it, with the page and the registry’s record ID for each. It describes the archived document as captured; the closing section explains why you should read the current version before acting on any of it.

Your Miles can expire in three ways

The document lists three circumstances:

“Discovery Miles are subject to expiry, which may occur under the following circumstances: • Five (5) years after the date of earning your Discovery Miles • In the event of no earning or spending of Discovery Miles within a consecutive 12-month period (referred to as the “dormancy rule”) • If you no longer have any qualifying Vitality product, such as Vitality Health, Vitality Drive and Vitality Money.” — Discovery Miles terms and conditions, 1 July 2026, p. 33, DSC-0086

The first is a time limit: a Mile earned today expires five years from now if unspent. The second is the dormancy rule: if twelve consecutive months pass in which you neither earn nor spend any Discovery Miles, the balance can expire — regardless of how recently the Miles in it were earned. The third attaches the balance to your product holdings: if you no longer have any qualifying Vitality product — the document names Vitality Health, Vitality Drive and Vitality Money — your Miles can expire for that reason alone.

Only the first of these existed in the corpus’s oldest Miles document. The 19 June 2018 terms state one expiry rule: “Discovery Miles expire after five years from the date that you earned them. If you don’t use your Discovery Miles before they expire, you will lose them.” (p. 10, DSC-0152). The dormancy rule and the product-linked expiry appear, of the corpus’s dated Miles documents, first in the 17 May 2024 rules (p. 9, DSC-0136) — both checked against the full text of each document, not only the extracted clauses.

If you close your Discovery Bank accounts

Closing your qualifying account ends earning; closing all your accounts closes the Miles Account itself:

“If you close your qualifying Discovery Bank account, you’ll no longer qualify to earn Discovery Miles from Discovery Bank. If you close all your Discovery Bank accounts, then your Discovery Miles Account will close and your Discovery Miles will no longer accumulate in this account.” — p. 33, DSC-0089

What happens to the balance depends on what you do first:

“Before you close your Discovery Bank account, you have the option to exchange your Discovery Miles for cash. This is done in the Discovery Bank app. If this is not done, you will forfeit your total Discovery Miles balance when you close your account. If you have an active Vitality Health policy, these Discovery Miles will not be transferred to your Vitality Active Rewards Discovery Miles balance.” — p. 33, DSC-0090

In plain terms: if you close your accounts, the document gives you one path to keeping the value — exchange the Miles for cash in the Discovery Bank app before the closure. If you do not, the document states that you forfeit the entire balance. The final sentence addresses one specific case directly: holding an active Vitality Health policy does not carry the balance across.

If you cancel the Vitality product that earns them

The same page group covers the Vitality side:

“As a Vitality Health member with Vitality Active Rewards, a Vitality Drive member with Vitality Active Rewards or a Vitality Money member with Vitality Active Rewards, if you cancel your Vitality Health policy, Vitality Drive programme, Vitality Money programme or your Vitality Active Rewards benefit, you have until the last day of your membership or benefit to use your Discovery Miles. If you do not spend your Discovery Miles prior to closure, you will forfeit your Discovery Miles balance.” — p. 34, DSC-0092

If you cancel your Vitality Health policy, Vitality Drive programme, Vitality Money programme or the Vitality Active Rewards benefit, you have until the last day of your membership to spend the Miles. Whatever is unspent on that day, the document states, is forfeited.

If you die

The balance is not extinguished at death. The master Discovery Bank rewards terms and conditions (13 November 2024, captured 23 July 2026) state: “47. In the event of death, we will transfer the Discovery Miles balance to the deceased’s Discovery Bank account, which will then form part of the deceased’s estate.” (p. 6, clause 47, DSC-0040). The Miles terms put it in their own words: “If you pass away, the Discovery Miles balance will be monetised to your Discovery Bank account and that will then form part of your estate.” (p. 33, DSC-0088). In other words, on death the balance is converted and passed into the estate — the one exit in these pages where the documents transfer the value rather than ending it.

Reading these rules together

Every route out — inactivity, product exit, account closure — ends in expiry or forfeiture unless the balance is spent or converted first, and the conversion window is defined by the exit itself: before closure, before the last day of membership. The registry’s first essay, The lock-in evolved, places these rules in a wider pattern; the entry on Discovery’s documents stating different values for the same Miles thresholds is worth reading alongside them, since the same document set that defines these exits also carries diverging figures for what Miles earn.

Before you act on any of this

This essay describes documents as they stood when captured: the Discovery Miles terms and conditions dated 1 July 2026, captured 21 July 2026, and the Discovery Bank rewards terms and conditions dated 13 November 2024, captured 23 July 2026. Those documents themselves reserve the right to change — the Miles terms state that Discovery Vitality can “Change these terms and conditions” (p. 34, DSC-0093, with notice addressed in a footnote, DSC-1678). The registry archives what the documents said on the capture date; it does not track them in real time, and it does not give financial or legal advice. If you are deciding whether to close an account, cancel a product or spend down a balance, read the provider’s current terms first — and if the numbers matter, read them on the tab that matches your product combination.