We consider the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon $a_{\mu }$, which shows a significant deviation from the Standard Model expectation given the recent measurements at Fermilab and Brookhaven National Lab (BNL). We focus on Standard Model effective field theory (SMEFT) with the aim to identify avenues for the upcoming LHC runs and future experiments such as MUonE. To this end, we include radiative effects to $a_{\mu }$ in SMEFT to connect the muon anomaly to potentially interesting searches at the LHC, specifically Higgs decays into muon pairs and such decays with resolved photons. Our investigation shows that, similar to results for concrete UV extensions of the Standard Model, the Fermilab/BNL result can indicate strong coupling within the EFT framework and $a_{\mu }$ is increasingly sensitive to a single operator direction for high scale UV completions. In such cases, there is some complementarity between expected future experimental improvements, yet with considerable statistical challenges to match the precision provided by the recent $a_{\mu }$ measurement.