Forgive me if this has been answered, however I did try to find an answer to this myself and couldn't.

I am a Gold Mileage Plus member at the moment. I generally fly LAX-IAH and LAX-EWR so the roundtrip economy ticket prices are never more than $500 or so, and as such I always just pay cash. Over the last few years of trying to fly United often, I have racked up some miles and have recently started using my miles to upgrade to first, as I don't have much other use for them.

With the routes I fly, there are always too many passengers with higher status than me so I never get upgraded. I can only recall one time flying to Mexico City where I got the complimentary upgrade.

So on this upcoming flight I have from IAH-LAX in a couple days I put in the request to upgrade for 15k miles.

I just looked at the flight status and I see my name is second on the upgrade list.

I assume this is because of my upgrade request, right? I just want to confirm because if its my Gold status that has me at #2, there is no reason for me to waste the 15k miles for an upgrade I may get for free.

TL;DR

Do paid upgrade requests reflect on the upgrade list?

Thank you in advance and again apologies if this is a silly question that has been answered before.