How to Share Your Tesla Referral Code and Earn $250 Credits

If you already own a Tesla, your referral link is a small, real perk — worth $250 in Tesla Credits each time someone buys through it. Here is how to find and share it, and what the reward covers.

Where your link lives

Your personal referral link is in the Tesla app, in the referrals or "Refer and Earn" section. It is a ts.la/<code> URL tied to your account. Copy it from there rather than reusing someone else's — otherwise the credit goes to them, not you.

What you earn

Each successful vehicle or solar referral earns you $250 in Tesla Credits. Credits appear in the Tesla app and can be spent on Supercharging, software upgrades and merchandise. The reward is capped at 10 referrals per calendar year, so plan around that ceiling if you refer a lot.

How to share it well

Tell the buyer to open your link before configuring, and to confirm the benefit shows in their order summary before they pay — that is what makes the referral "successful" and pays you. A vehicle order and a solar order count separately, so a buyer doing both can use a referral on each.

One caveat by region

Referrer rewards can be limited by local rules — for example, referrers in British Columbia may not receive the credit even when the buyer's benefit still applies. Check the Canada edition if that is you.

The reward has a clock on it, and nobody mentions this

Referral guides stop at "$250 in credits." That leaves out the part that actually costs owners money: the credits have a lifecycle, with two dates in it, and neither is the date you shared the link.

• Your referral sits as pending until the car is delivered. In the Tesla app the referral reads as ordered while the buyer waits. The credit only lands in your Tesla wallet once delivery happens — the delivery date is the grant date.
• Credits then expire twelve months after that grant date. They are not a balance that sits there indefinitely. Owner forums carry a steady trickle of posts from people who discovered the expiry after the fact.

Put those together and the practical shape of the reward changes. A referral you make in November whose car arrives in February gives you credits that run out the following February — sixteen months after you did the work, but only twelve months of usable window, and the clock started on a date you did not control.

Why the cap and the clock can disagree

The ten-per-calendar-year ceiling is described in terms of orders placed through your link. The grant date depends on delivery. In a quarter where Tesla's delivery queue stretches, those two can fall in different years — your tenth referral of one year can pay out in the next, and its expiry runs from there.

This matters most if you refer in volume near a year boundary. If you are close to the ceiling in December, the referral you add is competing for that year's cap while its money arrives, and starts expiring, on next year's schedule.

What to do with it before it lapses

Credits are Tesla-ecosystem value, not cash, so the useful question is what absorbs a balance reliably. Supercharging does, in small amounts continuously, which makes it the safe default if you have no specific plan. Accessories and merchandise absorb it in one go. Software upgrades absorb the most at once but only if you actually want the upgrade — buying one to avoid losing credits is how a perk turns into a purchase you did not intend.

The one habit worth forming: when a referral flips from pending to granted in the app, note the date. That is the only reliable record of when the balance dies, and it is the check no third-party guide can do for you.

Reward mechanics here are drawn from Tesla's Refer and Earn terms as reported by owners and secondary trackers; the pending-to-granted transition and the expiry date are both visible in your own Tesla app, which is the record we would trust over any published figure, including ours.