Just short of next status level, before my next flight will UA grant early status?
 

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You can ask, but don't pin your hopes on it. The worst that happens is they say no.

They are bound and likely to do nothing for you. It's silver, make the effort or what's the point if you don't fly enough anyhow.

Silver is not really worth it anyways.

For ORD-GRU, getting a 25% mileage bonus and E+ is nothing to sneeze at.

Find a cheap / short one-way and buy the PQMs and then cancel the flight within 24 hours. That'll get you the miles necessary to get up to Silver before the trip.

^ Makes a world of difference-qualifying for silver <48 hours before HKG-ORD made a huge difference for me. Perhaps 25% mileage bonus for only one flight isn't a big deal for some of you where that would be a drop in the bucket, but not all of us are like you :p

You can buy an award accelerator on one leg of an earlier flight, but they may not be worth the cost.

Any status is better than no status
The accelerator is a good advise

Absolutely. E+ on the GRU flight probably costs a couple hundred bucks RT.

The only question is whether UA will sell a small enough amount for this to make sense.

OP, if you have other UA flights scheduled in the intervening months, look into using SDC ($75 without status) to do a routing change that will give you the extra miles. For example, if you're flying LAX-IAH, you can SDC (assuming fare class availability) and route LAX-SFO-IAH and score more than enough extra miles to make silver.

Not the cheapest option for the OP. Buying one of the super short flights and then using award accelerator will cost far less than $75. And avoids an extra leg. If he were shooting for Gold or higher SEC makes more sense.

in all honesty; they should give you a"soft landing" but knowing united dont count on it. just to a cheap mr!

$75 at about $0.13 per mile is about 580 miles. Can you purchase that few accelerator miles nowadays? Last year, I was offered exactly the trip mileage, now I get it rounded up, sometimes way up.

Exactly. I never get premier accelerator options that cost less than a couple hundred bucks. For SFO-SAN this weekend, the minimum I'm being offered is 3000 miles at $270 (in addition to $78 for the RDMs). Which is why I suggested SDC instead.

On a EWR-IAD flight, I was offered 500 premier accelerator miles for $57 (total including the award accelerator), which would be cheaper than a SDC. At the time, I assumed they rounded the flight distance up to the 500 mile minimum for the offer.