BJ’s Restaurant & Brewhouse — the 200-plus-location casual-dining chain built around deep-dish pizza, house-brewed craft beer, and the now-legendary Pizookie — runs Premier Rewards PLUS as its loyalty currency. The program has gone through at least one material rebrand (from plain Premier Rewards to the current PLUS designation), but the core mechanic has stayed consistent: spend money, accumulate points, convert to reward dollars. This review examines what that actually means for a typical member in 2025.

The core mechanics

Enrollment is free. Sign up through the BJ’s mobile app, the website, or in-restaurant, and you’re earning on the next check.

The earn rate is 1 point for every $1 spent on food and beverages, with taxes, gratuities, and alcohol excluded. There’s no ambiguity in the conversion: 100 points become a $10 reward automatically. The program does the math for you — points don’t sit in a balance waiting for manual redemption at an arbitrary threshold. When you hit 100, a $10 reward lands in your account.

That gives you a 10% effective cash-back rate on eligible spend, which is competitive for casual dining. Darden’s My Olive Garden Rewards, by comparison, delivers rewards at a lower effective rate. The caveat is what doesn’t count: alcohol, which at BJ’s represents a meaningful share of the average check at a brewhouse concept, falls outside the earning calculation entirely.

What you get for joining

The welcome bonus is a free Pizookie upon registration. BJ’s Pizookies are a genuine signature item — an individual deep-dish cookie served warm with ice cream — and retail for around $8–10 depending on location. Getting one free on the first visit means the program pays back the sign-up effort immediately, before you’ve spent a dollar.

The birthday reward is also a free Pizookie, redeemable within a window around your birthday. Both welcome and birthday rewards are the right brand move: the Pizookie is iconic enough to feel like a real gift rather than a generic dollar-off coupon. A lot of casual-dining programs hand out a $5 discount and call it a birthday celebration. BJ’s gives you the thing people actually drive to BJ’s for.

The 90-day expiration problem

Here’s the catch that matters most for infrequent diners: rewards expire 90 days after they’re issued.

This is a shorter window than many casual-dining peers offer, and it creates a structural disadvantage for anyone who doesn’t dine at BJ’s at least a few times per quarter. A guest who visits twice in the spring, earns a $10 reward in late March, and doesn’t return until July will find that reward gone. The expiration clock runs from issuance, not from when you were notified.

The program’s terms document this; it isn’t hidden. But the 90-day window isn’t prominently surfaced during sign-up, and for a program targeting a casual-dining audience that skews toward occasional visitors, it represents a real value drain. Members who don’t monitor their accounts will lose earned rewards.

The workaround is simple — check your account before rewards expire — but it requires members to be actively engaged with a loyalty program that many join passively.

App integration: the real competitive advantage

The BJ’s mobile app is the strongest operational argument for Premier Rewards PLUS. The app handles Dine-In Order Ahead, Curbside, Takeout Order Ahead, Mobile Pay, and loyalty point tracking in a single interface. Members can check their balance, see active offers, and redeem rewards at the table without the friction of telling the server a phone number or presenting a card.

For a casual-dining concept — where the loyalty experience is usually a clunky server-side lookup or a paper coupon — this level of app integration is above average. It won’t match the sophistication of quick-service programs built natively around mobile-first ordering, but against peers like Applebee’s or Chili’s, BJ’s mobile infrastructure is meaningfully better.

Members who won’t install the app get a degraded but functional experience via phone-number lookup. The gap is real but not disqualifying.

Bonus-point promotions

Beyond the base earn rate, BJ’s runs periodic bonus-point promotions tied to new menu launches, seasonal pushes, and weekday traffic-building initiatives. Attentive members can stack these to compress their redemption cycle. A member earning a double-point promotion during a visit can hit the 100-point threshold twice as fast on that check.

The frequency and generosity of these promotions vary. They’re not guaranteed income from the program, but they’ve been a consistent feature of how BJ’s has used Premier Rewards to drive traffic, and an engaged member who watches the app can meaningfully improve their effective earn rate during promotion windows.

No tier recognition

The program is flat. A guest dining at BJ’s three times a week earns the same per-dollar rate and receives the same communications as a guest who visits four times a year. There’s no status layer, no VIP recognition, no accelerated earning for heavy spenders.

For a brewhouse concept where a meaningful segment of the customer base are genuine regulars — regulars who may spend $50 to $100 per visit including bar tabs — the absence of any recognition tier is a missed opportunity. A status program that identified high-frequency guests and offered even modest differentiation (priority reservations, enhanced birthday treatment, early access to seasonal beer releases) would almost certainly drive incremental loyalty from the guests who already like the brand most.

Compared to peer casual-dining programs

Against Chili’s My Chili’s Rewards, BJ’s offers a more transparent earn structure but a shorter reward expiration window. Against Applebee’s Neighborhood Rewards (since discontinued and relaunched), BJ’s has more consistent infrastructure. Against Darden properties like Olive Garden, BJ’s welcome bonus is more valuable and the mobile experience is better. No casual-dining program at this tier approaches the sophistication of a Starbucks Rewards or a quick-service app-native program — the comparison class is other sit-down chains, and within that class BJ’s lands in the upper half.

Bottom line

Premier Rewards PLUS earns its place in your app for any guest who visits BJ’s more than twice a year. The sign-up Pizookie alone is worth the two minutes. The 10% effective return on food spend is honest value. The 90-day reward expiration is the one rule worth memorizing — set a calendar reminder or check your account before rewards lapse.

The program won’t dazzle loyalty enthusiasts, and the absence of tier recognition is a genuine structural gap. But for what it is — a free, easy-to-understand dining rewards program at a casual-dining chain with a strong mobile app — it does the job.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a fee to join Premier Rewards PLUS? No. Enrollment is free through the BJ’s app, website, or in-restaurant.

How do I earn points? 1 point per $1 spent on food and beverages at participating locations. Taxes, gratuities, and alcohol purchases are excluded.

When do points convert to a reward? Automatically at 100 points. You don’t need to manually trigger a redemption — a $10 reward is issued to your account when you hit the threshold.

What’s the birthday reward? A free Pizookie, redeemable within a window around your birthday.

Do rewards expire? Yes — rewards expire 90 days after they are issued. Unredeemed points expire after 365 days without a qualifying purchase, so an active member keeps earning, but a long lapse wipes the point balance. Once points convert to a $10 reward, the shorter 90-day clock starts.

Can I earn points on alcohol? No. Alcohol purchases are excluded from point earning, as are taxes and gratuities.

Can I earn on third-party delivery? Generally no. Orders placed through DoorDash, Uber Eats, or other third-party platforms typically do not earn Premier Rewards PLUS points. Direct orders through the BJ’s app or website do earn.

Further Reading from Authoritative Sources

  • FTC consumer data guidance — FTC guidance on data collection practices and consumer disclosure is relevant to the data-for-rewards exchange BJ’s Premier Rewards PLUS requires members to accept.
  • National Retail Federation — NRF industry data provides the peer benchmarks against which BJ’s Premier Rewards PLUS is compared throughout the review.