Microsoft replaced Level 1 and Level 2 with Member, Silver, and Gold tiers — and the US switched over in July 2026. Here's what changed, what you'll actually earn now, and what it means for automation.
Microsoft has rebuilt the Rewards program from the ground up, and as of mid-July 2026 the new dashboard has landed in the United States. If you logged in recently and found a layout you didn't recognize, that's why.
Here's what changed, in one breath:
The honest summary: almost everyone will earn less than they did six months ago. If that's frustrating, you're in extremely good company — the Microsoft Q&A thread announcing the US switch filled up with complaints within days, and the reaction on r/MicrosoftRewards has been overwhelmingly negative.
Note: The US rollout is only days old as of this writing, and Microsoft has been adjusting values region by region since January. Some numbers below are confirmed across multiple regions but may still shift in the US specifically. Check your own dashboard before planning around any figure here.
The old system asked you to re-earn Level 2 every month by hitting a points threshold. The new system works the same way — the thresholds and the names just changed.
Tier status is earned monthly, not for life. Your dashboard spells it out: you become a Silver member by earning 500 points in the month, and a Gold member by earning 750 points in the month and completing two level-up activities. Benefits are granted "through" the end of the month — a Silver account reads "Silver benefits through August 31" — so if you stop hitting the threshold, you fall back. There's no permanent, once-and-done Gold status; it's a monthly chore, which is one more reason a daily routine matters under the new system.
The dashboard's own comparison table lays the tiers out side by side. These are the confirmed US values:
| Benefit | Member | Silver | Gold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Level requirement (points/month) | — | 500 | 750 |
| Level-up activities (per month) | — | — | 2 |
| Bing search — daily points limit (5 pts/search) | 25 | 50 | 100 |
| Monthly Level Bonus | 100 | 300 | 700 |
| Default Search Engine Bonus (per month) | 50 | 150 | 350 |
| Bing STAR Bonus — up to | 500 | 1,500 | 3,500 |
| Redemption discount coupon (points) | — | 100 | 200 |
| Microsoft Store points per $1 | 1x | 10x | 10x |
| Xbox points per $1 | 4x | 4x | 4x |
Under the old system, a Level 2 user in the US could earn 150 points/day from PC searches plus another 100/day from mobile. The new caps are a shared ceiling across every device — even Gold's 100/day is below what old PC search alone paid, and Silver's 50/day is a third of it.
That's the single biggest change in the whole overhaul, and it's worth sitting with: the new search caps earn far less than the old top tier did — and that's before accounting for the mobile bucket disappearing into the same cap.
As the table shows, Gold roughly doubles Silver across the board: a 700-point Monthly Level Bonus (vs. 300), a 350-point Default Search Engine Bonus for keeping Bing as your default for 14 days (vs. 150), a 3,500-point STAR ceiling (vs. 1,500), and a 200-point redemption coupon (vs. 100). The catch is the requirement — Gold takes 750 points and two level-up activities every month, where Silver just needs 500 points.
On top of the tier benefits, the new system layers a streak-and-stamp economy that rewards showing up daily: a Bing Search streak, a Daily Set streak, an Edge browsing streak, a Bing app check-in streak, and more. Hold any of them for 7 days in a row and you earn a stamp; collect 12 stamps and you get a 1,000-point Stamp Bonus. There's even "streak protection" to cover the odd missed day. None of it rewards searching hard — it rewards searching every day.
This is the piece generating the most confusion, so it's worth being precise.
The Bing STAR Bonus is a monthly allocation — with a ceiling that depends on your tier (500 at Member, 1,500 at Silver, 3,500 at Gold) — credited at the end of the month. It isn't earned by completing a specific list of tasks. Instead, Microsoft's algorithm evaluates whether your search behavior across the month looks consistent, authentic, and natural, and pays out accordingly.
Three things you should know about it:
1. Most people will not get anywhere near the maximum. Per figures Microsoft itself provided, roughly 80% of users will receive under 300 points, with only about a fifth landing above that. The tier ceiling — 1,500 at Silver, 3,500 at Gold — is a number almost nobody touches.
2. There is no transparency on how it's calculated. There's no progress bar telling you what "authentic" means, no breakdown of what moved the number, and no way to audit the result. You find out what you earned when the month ends. For a program that previously ran on countable, predictable daily tasks, this is a substantial shift in how much certainty you get.
3. It targets patterned, bot-like behavior. Microsoft has stated that bot-like or automated search patterns reset STAR progress. This is worth understanding if you use any automation tool — including this one.
If you use Points Harvest, here's the honest read. Automated searching is against the Microsoft Rewards Terms of Service — that has always been true and we've always said so. What the STAR Bonus adds is an algorithmic check on whether your search behavior looks natural over the month.
What's being detected here is patterning — mechanical, evenly-spaced, round-the-clock searching. Points Harvest is built specifically to avoid that: delays are drawn from a long-tailed human distribution rather than a fixed interval, so most gaps land in a natural range, some are quick bursts, and some are long distracted pauses. There's also a Stealth speed setting that stretches everything out considerably. A daily run of a couple dozen searches with varied timing is not obviously the thing this check is aiming at.
But the algorithm is invisible and unauditable, so nobody — us included — can tell you it definitely passes. Treat your STAR Bonus as at risk rather than as guaranteed income. With ~80% of users receiving under 300 points from STAR regardless, it shouldn't be the number your whole strategy rests on either way.
Here's the math for a Silver user in the US, counting only the reliably countable categories:
That's roughly 3,100 points/month, plus whatever streak stamps, "Keep earning" tiles, and Explore cards land that month. Run the same math for the other tiers and you get roughly ~2,000/month at Member and ~5,200/month at Gold — Gold pulls ahead mostly on its 100/day search cap and its 700-point level bonus.
For comparison, the same categories under the old Level 2 system came to well over 7,000 points/month. The overhaul cut reliable Bing-side earnings for a typical user by roughly half.
We've rewritten our full points breakdown around the new system if you want the category-by-category detail, including which parts Points Harvest handles and which parts are still unconfirmed post-rollout.
The strategy that made sense under the old system — grind out your full search cap as fast as possible — doesn't map cleanly onto the new one. A few adjustments worth making:
Consistency now beats volume. Both the streak bonus and the STAR Bonus reward showing up regularly across the month. A short daily session is worth more than an occasional marathon, which is close to the opposite of how the old caps incentivized behavior.
Keep your tier alive month to month. Tier status resets monthly — Silver needs 500 points in the month, Gold needs 750 plus two level-up activities — so the level bonus and higher cap only last as long as you keep clearing the threshold. A daily routine clears it comfortably; a month off drops you back down.
Recheck your own dashboard rather than trusting any guide — including this one. Microsoft has been quietly adjusting values throughout the rollout, and the US only migrated days ago. Your dashboard is the source of truth.
Don't over-invest in chasing STAR. Given that four out of five users land under 300 points, building your routine around maximizing an algorithm nobody can see is likely to produce more frustration than points.
Points Harvest reads your live points counter directly off the Rewards dashboard rather than assuming a fixed number, so it already stops at whatever your tier actually allows — it adapted to the new caps without needing a change. It still handles the Explore on Bing cards, Daily Set tiles, More Activities tiles, and search farming up to your cap, and it still pauses on quizzes and polls so you can answer them yourself.
What it can't do is manufacture points that no longer exist. A daily run under the new system produces meaningfully less than it did in April, because the program pays less. We've updated our own claims on this site to match — we'd rather give you a number that survives contact with your dashboard.
If you're new here and want to see what the automation actually does, the getting started guide walks through installation and a first run.