Does Cursor Have a Referral Program? No - It Was Discontinued

Cursor gives one reason: increased levels of fraud. New referral invites and referral rewards are no longer available as a result.

Guides written while the program was live still explain how to generate an invite, and those instructions now lead nowhere. They read fine, oddly enough, because nothing in the wording announces that the program expired. Check the date before you follow a referral step.

Fraud is also part of the reason Cursor gave for ending new sign-ups to the legacy student discount, on June 25, 2026, alongside the program holding it back from reaching students globally. That makes two discount programs with fraud among the stated causes. I would not call that a pattern, since Cursor has published nothing framing it as one, but in practice it means checking any discount you heard about second-hand against cursor.com/help before you plan a budget around it.

They stay. If you already received referral credits, they remain on your account and you can apply them to eligible charges the same way as before. What you cannot do is earn new referral rewards or send new referral invites through the program.

Cursor's page does not say more about what counts as an eligible charge, and I am not going to guess at the boundary. Your billing history at cursor.com/dashboard/billing is where the charge you care about actually landed, so start there.

The failure people hit is quieter than a vanished balance. A charge lands at the full amount, they remember being credited at some point, and they cannot tell whether it was spent earlier or never issued at all. Which is a hard thing to ask support about. The cheap prevention is a note of what you were credited and when, kept somewhere outside your Cursor account.

No. Referral links from the program no longer grant discounts or referral rewards for new sign-ups. The link may still resolve, which is why this catches people out (it looks like it worked, and nothing is applied).

What it costs is the gap between the price you expected and the price you agreed to, charged again every period. On Pro at $20 a month that line is small enough that it can sit unread on a card for months, and the size of it only surfaces when somebody adds up the year.

Timing is what makes this awkward to fix. Nothing on Cursor's referral page describes a way to apply a discount after the fact, so the moment to check is the confirm screen rather than the first invoice. Compare the amount you are charged against the list price for that plan at cursor.com/pricing.

Two routes remain, both listed on Cursor's referral page itself: yearly billing and the student channels. Only the first has a number attached to it.

The two rows are not equivalent, though the table gives them equal weight.

Yearly billing is a price you can act on today. The student row is a channel you join and then wait on, since the legacy rate behind it is closed to new sign-ups. Cursor's billing guide covers what replaced it.

The 20% figure lines up with Cursor's published seat pricing, where a Teams Standard seat is $32 per seat per month annually against $40 monthly. Per-model rates, which are the other half of what you actually pay, sit in models and pricing.

Which half dominates depends on the account. The yearly discount is priced against the plan, as those seat figures show. Usage past your included allowance bills separately at API rates, so on a heavy month the 20% comes off the smaller line. The easier half to get wrong, I think, is the usage one, because it is the half that changes month to month. Pricing explained has the allowance and pool detail.

If you already know you are keeping Cursor for the year, yes. Yearly billing is the route Cursor points at on the referral page, and it is the only one of the two with a published percentage behind it.

Team size changes which decision you are actually making. On two or three seats this is close to a personal call about cash flow. On thirty, the seat mix moves more money than the billing term does, since a Teams Premium seat lists at $120 monthly against Standard's $40 for five times the included usage. The referral page stops at the percentage, so if your headcount is still moving, ask support how seat changes work mid-term before you commit.

The obvious move from all this is to switch to yearly and bank the 20%. That is not quite the decision on the table, though. What you are buying is a year at a lower rate, and if you are still working out whether Cursor fits your week, the monthly price is what keeps that option open. Settle the fit first, then switch.

On Pro, Pro+ and Ultra, Cursor applies the same refund rules to annual and monthly plans. They reach your most recent payment only, and only if it was charged within the last 14 days with no usage in that period. Past that, Cursor's refund page says you are committed for the current billing period, which on a yearly plan is the year.

Start at cursor.com/dashboard/billing to review your subscription and billing history, since the balance question is often answered there. For anything the dashboard does not settle, contact support while signed in and include your account email and a short description of the issue.

Before you write that ticket, check which account you are signed in as. Credits sit on the account that earned them.

Then check access. On a Teams or Enterprise plan only team admins can open billing and invoices, so a member has no way to look up a credit balance and has to ask an admin for it. Where a balance is missing on a team plan, that is the likelier of the two explanations.

Keep the ask to credits you already have. New referral rewards are no longer available, so a ticket asking for a fresh one has nowhere to land, however it is worded. The message worth sending names the specific charge you expected a credit to cover and the date it was billed, alongside the account email Cursor asks for.