Referrer Reward: $250 or $500? Here's How We'd Verify It

Every source we checked agrees on the buyer side: three months of Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on Model 3, Model Y and the eligible Cybertruck trims, unchanged since the March 2026 overhaul that swapped upfront cash discounts for the software trial. The referrer side is where reporting splits. Electrek's guide and Tesla's own Refer and Earn page both put the reward at $250 in Tesla Credits per successful referral. A separate 2026 guide, Teslarefcodes.com's referral write-up, states $500. Same program, two different numbers in circulation right now.

Where the two numbers come from

We list $250 on our own current-status page, sourced to Tesla's Refer and Earn page and corroborated by Electrek's guide. We have not been able to find $500 stated anywhere on Tesla's own support pages as of this writing. That doesn't automatically make $500 wrong — Tesla has changed referrer rewards before, and a guide could be reflecting a promotional bump we haven't caught yet — but it means the higher figure currently rests on a single third-party source rather than Tesla's own page.

The two-minute check we'd run before trusting either number

First, go straight to tesla.com/support/refer-and-earn yourself — not a cached copy, not a screenshot in someone's article — and read the dollar figure Tesla states today. Second, if you already own a Tesla and have made a referral, open the Tesla app and check "Refer a Friend": your own referral history shows the actual credit amount that landed in your account, which is the most direct confirmation there is, because it's your account's real figure rather than a quoted one. Third, note the date you checked, on both counts — the program has moved before (the March 2026 change is the clearest example), so a number without a check date is already stale the moment the program moves again.

What we're doing about it here

We're printing both figures with what we know about each, rather than quietly picking the more attractive one. Our own $250 figure carries a source (Tesla's support page, plus Electrek) and a check date; the $500 figure we're aware of does not, from what we can confirm. If that changes — if we find $500 stated on Tesla's own page — we'll correct this page and say so plainly, the same way we've corrected other stale figures before.

Before assuming someone is wrong: they may describe a different case

There's a step worth taking before the verification check above, because it resolves a fair number of these apparent contradictions without anyone being at fault. Two accurate sources can report different figures if they're describing different conditions. A referral reward isn't one global number — it varies along at least three axes, and most articles state only the figure, not the case it belongs to.

• Market. The same programme pays differently by country, and in different units — credits in one market, charging distance in another. A dollar figure in a US article isn't a wrong version of a European figure; it's a different one.
• Date of grant. Terms have been revised more than once. An article from before a revision can be an accurate record of what applied then, which makes it a bad guide to now and a fine guide to history — provided it's dated, which is exactly what's usually missing.
• Conditions attached to the order. Some reward tiers depend on what the buyer added — most visibly, whether FSD was included. Two figures can both be right for the same market on the same day if one describes the base case and the other the enhanced one.

So the useful first question isn't "which source is lying" but "which case is each one describing" — and if a page doesn't say, that's the finding. A figure without a market, a date and a condition attached isn't a fact you can carry into your own order; it's a number that happened to be true somewhere.

What this doesn't affect

If you're the one being referred rather than the one referring, none of this changes your order. The buyer benefit — the FSD (Supervised) trial — is the same $250-vs-$500 question doesn't touch it at all; that number only matters to the account making the referral, not the one receiving the code.