Tesla has launched a new referral program in the US that pays owners for fully autonomous (supervised) driving instead of rewarding car sales. A referred owner gets a free month of FSD, and the referrer gets a free month or a $99 Tesla credit if that person starts paying.
At the same time, Tesla’s Refer and Earn terms no longer include any vehicles as qualifying purchases for buyer or referrer rewards. Buy a Tesla today with a friend’s code and neither of you will receive anything.
How the FSD reference works
To share a link, you must pay FSD (monitored) monthly or own it directly before Tesla stopped selling it, according to Tesla’s FSD referral support page. Homeowners who obtained FSD through a one-year grant are not eligible to participate. The link is located under “Refer and Earn” in the Tesla app, version 4.62.0 or later.
The person on the other end must own a registered Tesla with compatible hardware, cannot have paid FSD in the last 12 months, and cannot have purchased it outright. There’s also a catch for recent buyers: anyone who’s taken a free FSD trial with a new car won’t be able to access the referral links until 12 months after the trial ends.
If the friend converts, subscribers get a free month and outright owners get a $99 credit, the same as a month’s subscription. Credits expire after 12 months and cannot be withdrawn. Tesla limits you to 12 rewards per calendar year, so the most anyone can earn is one year of FSD or $1,188 in credits.
Tesla’s own pages don’t quite match up at the moment. The FSD page says that the referrer is rewarded when the friend subscribes during the trial, while the main Refer and Earn page says afterward.
the cars are outside
The biggest change is hidden on Tesla’s Refer and Earn page. Buyer benefits now apply only to solar panels. Referral benefits cover solar, first demo units (up to 30 over the life of an account), and new FSD referral.
The Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck only appear in loyalty benefits for existing owners who purchase another Tesla product. The Model S and Model X do not appear on the list.
Tesla did not announce the change. The page is stamped “Updated February 24, 2026,” so it’s unclear exactly when the vehicles came off the list.
It’s a big twist for a show that’s always focused on moving cars. When Tesla brought back the referral program in August 2024, a buyer got $1,000 off a Model S, X, Y, or 3, and the referrer got $500 in credit. Tesla has eliminated and revived the program several times over the last decade, but cars were always at the center of it. Not anymore.
The metric that matters
Tesla stopped selling FSD entirely on February 14, and new US customers can now only subscribe for $99 per month. In its third quarter shareholder letter, Tesla reported 1.74 million active FSD subscriptions, a 67% year-over-year increase, a count that includes previous initial buyers and excludes free trials.
That’s the exact metric for Elon Musk’s 2025 CEO Performance Award, which includes a milestone of 10 million active FSD subscriptions. It’s the reason Tesla started revealing the number in January.
The free month a friend receives does not count toward that total. A conversion does pay, and that is precisely the event for which the new program pays.
Electrek’s opinion
This is a cheap program for Tesla and one built directly on what is arguably now its core business: selling FSD. Tesla used to offer $1,000 discounts to generate referrals. Now give away a month of software that is already in the car, and the referrer receives more of that same software or a credit that can only be spent at Tesla. In exchange, Tesla gets a subscriber for $99 a month.
The recipient must already own a Tesla, so the program doesn’t add a single car to the fleet. It is designed to exploit the existing fleet for subscriptions. Tesla had sold around 8.9 million vehicles by the end of 2025, and only 1.74 million are paying for FSD, so there’s plenty of room. At the pace of the third quarter, we estimate that we are still about eight years away from reaching 10 million subscriptions.
So Tesla stopped paying for referrals that require selling a car and started paying for those that move the number in Musk’s pay package. We think that says a lot about what the company’s priorities are right now.
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