How much money sits on unused gift cards? $23 billion, and why yours is part of it

A gift card is money someone already paid for. The surprising thing is how much of it never gets spent, and how ordinary the reasons are: it arrived as a text, it went into a drawer, the expiry was never written down.

How much money is on unused gift cards?

Bankrate's survey put it plainly: 47% of US adults have at least one unused gift card, voucher or store credit, worth an estimated $23 billion in total and about $187 per person holding one. That is not a rounding error in the retail economy. Retailers have a word for the part that is never redeemed, breakage, and a line in the accounts for it.

The same survey found that a majority of people with unused cards had held them for more than a year. The card was not rejected. It was forgotten.

Bankrate repeated the survey in August 2024: the share holding an unused card fell to 43%, but the average value per person rose to $244 and the national total to about $27 billion. Fewer people, more money each. The pile is not shrinking.

Why do gift cards go unused?

Three mechanisms do most of the work. The first is arrival channel. A physical card sits in a wallet and gets seen; a code in an SMS or an email is buried by the next fifty messages within a day. Employer benefits, restaurant coupons and gift cards from friends arrive almost exclusively as text, which is the worst possible place for something that has to be remembered in four months.

The second is invisible expiry. Most people could not say which of their vouchers expires first. In the United States the CARD Act, through Regulation E, requires gift cards to stay valid for at least five years, which helps with the classic gift card and does nothing for the promotional coupon that dies in thirty days. The short-dated ones are the ones you lose. The rules elsewhere are different again; the expiry rules by country are their own guide.

The third is the special occasion trap: a voucher feels like a treat to be saved for the right moment, so it waits, and the right moment arrives after the expiry date. The research on that is the deadline effect, and it says a shorter deadline gets a voucher used far more often than a long one.

PeakVoucher does this from your own data. A wallet for the vouchers buried in your messages. Join the free beta →

What is gift card breakage?

Breakage is the accountant's name for the share of gift card value that will never be redeemed. A retailer that sells a card has your money and owes you goods; when it becomes clear the goods will never be claimed, the liability is released and the money becomes income. From the shop's side an unused card is one of the best sales it will ever make: paid in full, never fulfilled.

From your side it is a loan at zero interest to a company that would rather you forgot. Nothing about that is illegal. It is simply where the incentives sit, which is why the system that gets cards used has to be yours, not theirs.

Which cards are most likely to be forgotten?

Not the big ones. A $200 card from a parent gets remembered because it feels like money. The cards that slip are the ones with small values and short lives: a $15 coffee credit, a restaurant coupon in a text, a $30 employer benefit with a ninety-day window, store credit from a return. Each is too small to plan around and too easy to leave for next week.

They are the same shape as the subscriptions you forgot: individually trivial, collectively a few hundred dollars a year, and invisible precisely because no single one is worth the effort of looking. A list that shows them together changes the arithmetic.

Do unused gift cards expire?

Sometimes, and the printed date is what counts. A classic gift card in the US keeps its funds for at least five years from purchase or last load, and dormancy fees can only start after a year of inactivity. Promotional cards and coupons are outside that rule and expire whenever the issuer says. A card that has not expired is still spendable, even years later, even after the shop has changed hands, unless the company has gone into administration.

If a card has already lapsed, it is still worth a call: some retailers reinstate value as goodwill, and in some jurisdictions the expiry term itself was never enforceable. The steps are in the expiry guide linked above.

What fixes it?

Not discipline. A place. The money gets spent when the voucher is captured on the day it arrives, when its expiry is a date the system knows rather than a line you meant to note, and when the list you look at is sorted by that date rather than by shop or by when you got it. Then the till needs the code in a form it can actually read, because a voucher you cannot redeem in the queue is a voucher you put back in the drawer.

The whole method fits in one guide to keeping track of gift cards: capture on arrival, three fields, sorted by expiry, partial balances tracked, one wallet for the household.

How PeakVoucher does it

PeakVoucher reads the SMS or the pasted message, pulls out the amount, the expiry and the code, and files the voucher in one wallet grouped by what expires next: red under fourteen days, amber under sixty. It draws a scannable barcode at the till, on the phone or on a Galaxy Watch, and it tracks partial balances so a $150 card with $40 left is still a card.

The insights screen shows what is held, what is at risk in the next two weeks, and, honestly, what has already been lost to expiry.

Hen Eytan · Founder, UPeak

Builds the UPeak apps and writes up the research behind them.