The ANA SFC Devaluation Isn't What Twitter Thinks It Is
ANA announced on 23 April 2026 that, from FY2028, only SFC members spending 3 million yen a year on their ANA card will keep lounge access. Social media has reacted as you'd expect, but I beg to differ.
Author
Iqbal Abdullah
UPDATE: ANA reevaluated the SFC program on September 2026 and some of the information on this page is no longer true. Get the latest update from our followup article.
I should say up front: I am an ANA SFC (Super Flyers Card) member. I fly enough to qualify as a heavy user. So when the announcement landed in my inbox on 23 April 2026, my first reaction was the same as everyone else's. Annoyance. Then a quick scan of social media, where the temperature was uniform. "Devaluation." "Betrayal." "I'm cancelling."
Then I sat down with the actual document and with my own usage history, and I ran the numbers. The picture changed. This is not the catastrophe a lot of people are calling it. The reason is simple: the lounge was never the most valuable thing SFC gave you.
What Actually Changed
From FY2028, SFC splits into two tiers, judged on a one-year window from 16 December 2026 to 15 December 2027.
- SFC PLUS (3 million yen or more in annual ANA card spending): keeps Star Alliance Gold, keeps ANA lounge access, gets a 5,000-mile bonus.
- SFC LITE (less than 3 million yen): downgrades to Star Alliance Silver, no more lounge access.
A few details worth knowing. Family members' card spending counts towards the household total. ANA Pay top-ups don't count. Anyone who has already accumulated 1 million lifetime miles is locked into PLUS regardless of spending. Existing members and new members are treated identically, which the Japanese press is calling 一斉足切り (the across-the-board cut-off).
One thing to note before reaching for the pitchforks. Three million yen a year works out to roughly 250,000 yen a month. If you put your rent (where it is possible), utilities, insurance, groceries, and any business expenses on the ANA card, that number is reachable for a lot of people without changing how they live. It is not the impossibly high bar the headline suggests.
What PLUS Gets You vs What LITE Gets You
PLUS is essentially the SFC you have now. LITE drops the lounge and the Star Alliance Gold downgrade kicks in. But here is the part most of the panic skips: priority boarding, priority baggage, priority security, the dedicated counter, and domestic flight advance booking all stay. The only thing you actually lose under LITE is the lounge.
Read that again. Most of the headlines do not.
Why Japan Has SFC at All, and What JAL Did
SFC is a uniquely Japanese arrangement, sometimes called a Galapagos system. Almost every other airline programme on the planet judges your elite status year by year, based on flights actually flown. SFC lets you pay an annual fee and keep the status forever. JAL has the same kind of programme, JGC (now the Life Status Program), and tightened it in January 2024.
JAL went one way: grandfather existing members, raise the bar only for newcomers. ANA went the other: treat every generation the same, raise the bar for everyone at once. ANA's approach is arguably fairer between generations. It is also why existing members are angry.
According to Toyo Keizai's reporting, JAL's Life Status Program already earns roughly 40% of its revenue from non-flight sources. ANA is moving in the same direction. The plain reading: lounges are a fixed-cost millstone, the heavy-user population grew faster than the lounge capacity, and somebody has to pay for that.
The Lounge Has Already Got Worse
ANA framed the change as "easing congestion." That is treating a symptom. Anyone who has actually used an ANA lounge after COVID knows the deeper issue. International lounges have visibly cut their food. Domestic lounges are drinks only. At peak times you cannot find a seat.
"The lounge is valuable, so we must protect access to it" is starting to sound like a sentence about something that no longer quite exists. Increasingly, when I am at the airport, I get more done at a regular café than I would in the lounge. The lounge being your reason to keep SFC is, to me, not a strong reason on its own anymore.
What the Real Value Is
This is the part I most want you to take away. SFC's value is not the lounge. For me, about 70% of SFC's actual value sits in two things: priority boarding and the mileage accrual bonus.
- Priority Boarding (Group 2). Sounds boring. Saves you the cabin overhead bin lottery. On a packed domestic flight, that is the difference between a clean boarding and being the person whose bag gets gate-checked. It survives under LITE.
- Mileage Accrual Bonus. This is the most under-discussed part of the programme. SFC members earn substantially more miles per fare than non-members on the same flight. Over a few years of regular flying, the gap compounds. It shows up on the day you redeem for a long-haul business or first-class award. It survives under LITE.
Both of these survive the change. The headline-grabbing part (the lounge) is the part I personally use the least.
The Mile Maths
A concrete example using ANA's published accrual rules for domestic flights. One-way Haneda to Naha, base sector 984 miles. (Disclaimer: These calculation are done by me, but I might be wrong)
| Holder | Total miles earned |
|---|---|
| No card, regular member | 984 |
| ANA general card | ~1,082 |
| ANA Gold (status-chasing) | ~1,230 |
| SFC Gold | ~1,378 |
SFC Gold earns roughly 1.4× what a no-card member earns on the same flight. On long-haul international routes, the absolute gap per round trip runs into thousands of miles. If you fly often enough to be reading this with any concern, that gap is exactly what gets you to your next business or first-class award seat. The new rules do not touch this mechanism.
So What Do You Actually Do
Two reasonable paths.
- Keep PLUS. Move household card spending onto the ANA card. The bar is 250,000 yen a month. If your spending is already roughly there and you are just splitting it across three cards, consolidation is the move. No lifestyle change required.
- Accept LITE. Give up the lounge in exchange for keeping the parts of SFC that mattered to you in the first place. When you genuinely want a lounge, pay for it on the day. A Priority Pass-bearing card such as the Mitsubishi UFJ Platinum Amex (¥22,000/year) gets you into most of the world's airport lounges. If you specifically want ANA lounges, the ANA JCB Card Premium (¥77,000/year) and ANA VISA Platinum Premium (¥96,800/year) still get you in. (This last link brings lists up card which allows you to use the airport lounge and might be helpful.)
The path I would push back on is the third one: cancelling SFC outright because Twitter said you should. That trades away the actual value (boarding plus mile bonus) for the satisfaction of a protest gesture, and gestures are expensive.
The Mileage Game's Iron Rule
One last thing. Mileage programmes live and die at the airline's discretion. The terms can change at any time, in any direction, and they will. The only thing a frequent flyer can do is play the best hand inside whatever the rules currently are. Anger does not change the rules. Calm calculation does change your decision.
Mapped against my own actual usage, the new SFC isn't the end of the world. It is a prompt to look at what I am genuinely getting from the programme and what I am willing to pay for. That, I think, is the more useful exercise than mourning a lounge that had quietly stopped being worth mourning anyway.
