Marriott Bonvoy Points Calculator
Marriott's fifth night is free, but a certificate night doesn't count toward the five. That makes "should I burn a cert here" a real question with a wrong answer. This calculator costs the same stay three ways — all points, certificates plus points, and all cash.
Resort fees charged on awards
What one more night does to the rate
Effective cents per point at each stay length, holding the nightly points price constant. The step at night five is stay-for-5-pay-for-4, comping the cheapest night. Click a rung to load it.
How to use this calculator
Enter the stay: nights, the nightly cash rate from marriott.com before tax, the tax percentage, the resort fee per night, and the points total for the stay using the Points rate on marriott.com. Marriott applies its Stay for 5, Pay for 4 benefit automatically at booking, so if you pulled a five-night total from the site it probably already reflects the comp — tick "Quote already has the free night in it" accordingly, and the tool won't double-count it.
The verdict answers points versus cash the same way every calculator on this site does: it prices what paying cash really costs you — room, tax, fees, minus the value of the points you'd earn back — and divides by the points quoted. But on Marriott, points versus cash is usually not the interesting question.
Three ways to book the same stay
Marriott is dynamically priced like IHG, but it has a benefit worth more than the pricing model — Stay for 5, Pay for 4 — and a certificate system that quietly conflicts with it. So the real output of this page is the three strategy cards below the ladder: all points, certificates plus points, and all cash, each costed in your own dollars, with the cheapest highlighted and the others showing exactly how much more they'd cost.
Stay for 5, Pay for 4 works like this: redeem points for five consecutive nights at one property on a single reservation and the cheapest night is comped. No status required. It applies only to standard point redemptions — not Cash + Points, not certificate nights, not upgrade awards — and it repeats, so a ten-night booking comps the two cheapest nights.
The certificate trap
Certificate nights don't count toward the five-night requirement. Put a certificate on one night of a five-night stay and you're left with four points-nights, which means no free night — the certificate has bought you nothing but the loss of the comp. On a six-night stay the same certificate leaves five points-nights and the free night survives. This is the single most expensive mistake in the Bonvoy program, and the certificate card works it out for your exact stay: when the cert cancels the comp, the card says so in plain words and tells you to book all points and keep the cert.
Certificates also have no residual value. Apply one to a night worth less than its cap and you forfeit the difference with no refund — burn an 85,000-point cert on a 30,000-point night and 55,000 points evaporate. The cert capacity wasted stat tracks this. Top-offs run the other direction: you can add up to 25,000 points to stretch a certificate against a pricier night, and if the night costs more than cap plus 25,000, the cert simply can't reach it — the tool says so rather than silently modeling it.
Reading the ladder and the ledger
The ladder prices the stay at every length from one to eight nights, holding the nightly points price constant and applying the comp at five. The jump at five nights is the benefit landing; at four nights a flag points out that a fifth night is usually close to free in points terms. The ledger, meanwhile, shows why the cash side is stronger than it looks: 10 base points per dollar at most brands, your elite bonus on base points, and card earn calculated separately — because Marriott's own earning excludes tax, resort charges and gratuities, but your card issuer pays on the whole folio.
Resort fees are the asymmetry to remember: an Award Redemption Stay covers the room and room tax, but Marriott bills resort and destination fees on award stays at every status level. Your points cover the room; the fee is still cash at checkout. Since a cash booking pays the same fee it largely cancels out, but it does mean the "free" night isn't.
On valuation
The 0.75¢ default reflects the 2026 devaluation — Marriott walked award pricing up across the portfolio and third-party valuations drifted to roughly 0.7–0.8¢, down from about 0.84¢ in 2024. The 0.89¢ figure still floating around older calculators is stale. Points expire after 24 months of no activity, and Marriott sells them at 1.25¢ each outside promotions — well above what they're worth, so buying is rarely the move.