Your mileage earned resets to 0 each Jan 1. To be silver fir 5 years, you must fly 25k miles or more in each of those years; to be gold, fly 50k miles each year. And so forth. Chairmans/Platinum/etc tier bonuses are for bonus miles only and do not count toward status. On Jan 1, everyone has 0 PQM (Preferred qualifying miles) and a SP and a CP on the same flight will earn the same PQM as eachother. The CP gets more bonus miles, that's it.