Recruit A Friend, usually shortened to RAF, is one of the few features in World of Warcraft that quietly pays you for something you were probably going to do anyway: drag a friend into the game. Get them subscribed through your invite link and you start earning pets, transmog, free game time, and eventually a flying mount, all for keeping someone company in Azeroth.
The catch is that the program is poorly explained inside the game itself. Most players send an invite, see a half-finished reward bar, and never understand why their rewards are not unlocking. This guide clears all of that up. You will learn exactly how the rewards are earned, the full reward track for 2026, what your recruited friend gets, how to send the invite, and how to claim everything once it is yours.
What Recruit A Friend Actually Is
Recruit A Friend is Blizzard's built-in referral program. You send a personal invite link to someone, they create or reactivate a World of Warcraft account through that link, and the two accounts are linked for the purposes of rewards. From that point on, every month of paid subscription your recruit buys counts toward a reward track that only you, the recruiter, collect from.
It is worth being clear about what RAF is not. It is not a discount on your own subscription, and it is not a way to get someone else to pay your bill. It is a loyalty reward for bringing new or lapsed players back to the game. If you want the actual cost breakdown of a subscription, that lives in our guide to how much WoW costs in 2026. RAF sits on top of that, rewarding you when a friend pays for their own time.
You can recruit up to 10 friends through the system at once, so this scales nicely if you are the person in your friend group who is always trying to talk people into resubbing.
How the Rewards Are Earned (This Is the Part Everyone Gets Wrong)
Here is the single most important thing to understand. Your rewards are not based on how many friends you recruit. They are based on how many months of paid subscription your recruits buy in total. Blizzard calls these recruitment months.
That distinction changes everything about how you plan. One friend who buys a six-month subscription gets you exactly as far as three friends who each buy two months. The reward track does not care whose money it was, only that six months of game time were purchased through your linked recruits.
A few rules shape how this works:
Game time has to be paid. Free trial time, the starter experience, and time bought with WoW Tokens that the recruit did not purchase do not count toward your track.
Each individual recruit can contribute a maximum of 12 months to your total. After that, a single friend stops counting and you would need to recruit someone new to keep earning.
Months from all your recruits stack into one shared total, so two friends each at month three put you at six recruitment months overall.
Once you internalize that the unit is months and not people, the reward bar in-game finally makes sense.
The Full Recruit A Friend Reward Track for 2026
The current reward track runs through the first six recruitment months and then settles into a steady drip of game time after that. Here is the full progression, in order.
| Recruitment Month | Reward | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | Volatile Self-Driving Toolbox | Battle pet |
| Month 2 | Shredderizing Glove | Weapon transmog |
| Month 3 | Sappy Buddy | Back transmog |
| Month 4 | 30 Days Game Time | Subscription |
| Month 5 | S.C.A.N.N.E.R. Mk3 plus 30 Days Game Time | Head transmog and subscription |
| Month 6 | Rocket Shredder 9001 | Flying mount |
| Every 3 months after | 30 Days Game Time | Subscription (ongoing) |
The headline prize is the Rocket Shredder 9001, a goblin engineering flying mount that lands at month six. It is the reward most people are actually chasing when they search for RAF, and it is the reason the program is worth bothering with even if you only ever recruit one person who commits to half a year.
After month six the track stops handing out cosmetics and instead pays you 30 days of game time for every three additional recruitment months. In practice that means a friend who stays subscribed long term is effectively shaving real money off your own play time, since each chunk of free game time is a month you do not have to buy.
What Your Recruited Friend Gets
RAF is not a one-way street. The person you recruit picks up some genuinely useful perks that make leveling alongside you smoother, which also makes it a much easier sell when you are trying to convince them to come back.
A summon ability. Both linked accounts get the ability to summon each other roughly every 30 minutes. This is fantastic for skipping travel time and pulling a friend straight into your dungeon group or current zone.
A 30-slot bag. Completing the Exile's Reach starting experience grants a large bag to recruited accounts, which is a meaningful early-game quality of life boost when bag space is always tight.
Leveling together feels better. The whole design encourages you to actually play with the person you brought in rather than just trading an invite link, and the summon plus shared questing makes the early levels move quickly.
If your friend is brand new or coming back after a long break, point them at our new player catch-up guide so they are not overwhelmed the moment they log in. Returning players have their own version in the returning player catch-up guide.
How to Send a Recruit A Friend Invite
Sending an invite takes about a minute once you know where the button is hiding. The whole flow lives inside the game's social menu, not on a separate website.
Open the social menu. Press the O key in-game to bring up the social panel.
Find the Recruit A Friend tab. There is a dedicated tab inside that menu for recruiting. Click it.
Generate and send your link. You can send an invitation by email directly through the interface, or copy the unique link and hand it to your friend through Discord, a message, or however you normally talk to them.
Have them sign up through your link. Your friend has to create their account or reactivate a lapsed one using your specific invite. This is the step that links the two accounts. If they just go to the WoW site and subscribe on their own, the link will not register and you will earn nothing.
That last point is the most common way people lose out. The recruit must come in through your link, not through a generic store page. Double check they clicked yours before they pay for anything.
How to Claim Your Rewards
Earning a reward and receiving it are two separate steps. Once your recruitment months tick over a threshold, the reward becomes available to claim, but you have to go and grab it.
Head back to the Recruit A Friend tab in the social menu (the same O key panel) and look at your reward track. Anything you have unlocked will be ready to claim there. Mounts, pets, and transmog appear in the appropriate collection once claimed, and game time is applied to your account. If a reward looks unlocked but is not showing up, log out and back in, since the in-game tracker can lag behind your actual subscription status by a day or two.
Recruiting Yourself With a Second Account
There is a well-known loophole that lets you earn RAF rewards solo. Because the system only checks that a linked recruit account is paying for subscription time, you can invite yourself by using a second email address and a second Battle.net account, then subscribe on that account.
This works, and plenty of mount collectors do it specifically to guarantee the Rocket Shredder 9001 without depending on a friend who might unsubscribe at month four. The trade-off is real money: you are paying for a second subscription, so you only come out ahead in cosmetics and the partial game time the track returns, not in cash. If you already run a second account for things like multiboxing or a bank alt, folding RAF into it is close to free value. If you would be subscribing a second account purely for the mount, do the math first.
Notes for WoW Classic Players
Recruit A Friend behaves differently across game versions, and the polished reward track described above is built around modern retail World of Warcraft. Classic versions of the game have historically used simpler referral systems, and the specific mounts and cosmetic rewards on the retail track do not carry over to Classic realms. If you primarily play Classic, check the in-game social menu on your Classic client to see what referral options are currently active there, because Blizzard adjusts these per version and per anniversary event.
For everything else Classic related, from leveling to gold, our WoW Classic gold guide is a good starting point.
Watch Out for Recruit A Friend Scams
Because RAF involves links and account sign-ups, it is a favorite hook for scammers. A few rules keep you safe:
Only click invite links from people you actually know. A stranger in trade chat offering to "recruit you for free rewards" is fishing for something. The rewards go to the recruiter, not to you, so there is rarely a reason for a random person to push their link on you.
Never enter your login on a site reached through someone else's link. Legitimate RAF sign-up happens on Blizzard's own domains. Anything that looks like a Battle.net login page but lives somewhere else is a phishing attempt.
Do not buy or sell RAF recruits. Third parties selling "guaranteed RAF mount" services are usually paying for short subscriptions on throwaway accounts, which puts your account in a gray area and risks the reward being clawed back.
If you are weighing any kind of paid shortcut in WoW, it is worth reading our honest take in the guide to buying and selling WoW accounts first, since the same account-safety principles apply.
Is Recruit A Friend Worth It in 2026?
For most players the answer is a comfortable yes, with one condition: you need at least one person who is genuinely going to play. If you have a friend or partner who wants to try WoW or come back to it, RAF turns that into a free pet, a few transmog pieces, a flying mount, and ongoing game time, all of which you would otherwise have to chase or pay for. That is a strong return for sending a link.
If you do not have anyone to recruit, the value drops to the self-recruit loophole, which only makes sense if you already maintain a second account or you specifically want the Rocket Shredder 9001 badly enough to fund a short second subscription. It is not a money-saving trick on its own.
Either way, RAF pairs naturally with the rest of a healthy WoW routine. While your recruit levels up, you can be earning gold with our professions gold-making guide, and if you want them caught up to current content fast, the leveling and power-leveling guide covers the legitimate ways to speed things along.
Recruit A Friend FAQ
How many friends can I recruit? Up to 10 at once through the system, though remember the rewards track counts total months, not number of people.
Do I get the Rocket Shredder 9001 from one friend? Yes, as long as that friend's purchased subscription time totals six recruitment months. A single six-month subscription gets you there.
Does my recruit need to buy the latest expansion? They need paid subscription time, which is what feeds your reward track. The current expansion is a separate purchase from game time, so check our cost guide for how those pieces fit together.
What happens if my friend unsubscribes? Their accumulated months stay credited to you, but they stop adding new months until they resubscribe. You keep any rewards you already claimed.
Can the same friend recruit me back later? Each account can only contribute 12 months toward a given recruiter, so there is a ceiling, but you and a friend can absolutely recruit each other on separate accounts to both earn the track.
For the official rules and the current reward art, Blizzard maintains the program details on the official Recruit A Friend announcement, and the community keeps a running breakdown on the Wowhead RAF rewards guide.
Bring a friend in the right way and the whole thing is close to free value: you get the pet, the transmog, the mount, and the game time, and they get a 30-slot bag, a summon button, and someone to quest with. That is about as friendly as a referral program gets.