Business Gift Cards: What to Know Before You Send 300 of Them

You have a budget, a list of 300 names and a deadline. A gift card is the fast answer, and it is the one nobody can complain about. It is also a product with mechanics that most buyers only meet after the send has gone out: how two tax authorities classify it, what happens to the balance nobody spends, and how far personalisation actually reaches.

This guide covers those mechanics, and the cases where a gift card is the right call and you should send one. If your send lands in Q4, read it in September, before the budget is signed off rather than after.

Business gift cards mean two different things, and the difference matters

Search this term and you get two entirely different products on the same screen, and not one of those pages tells you which one you have landed on. Work out which buyer you are first.

Meaning one, buying cards to give. You are purchasing stored value from a retailer, a card network issuer or an aggregator, and handing it to employees, clients, channel partners or incentive winners. The card is spendable somewhere other than your own business. This is corporate gifting, and it is what the rest of this guide covers.

Meaning two, issuing your own. You run a salon, a cafe, a studio or a small shop, and you want branded cards your customers buy and redeem with you. That is a revenue product rather than a gift, and it needs different tooling. You need one of two things. For physical stock, a card printer: the plastic-card and business-card printing companies sell blank or custom-printed gift cards with barcodes or magnetic stripes, in small runs. To track the balance, use the gift card function already built into your point of sale or ecommerce platform. Almost all of them have one, and it handles issue, redemption and the liability on your books far better than a paper certificate and a spreadsheet.

If that second paragraph describes you, that is your answer and you can stop here. Everything below is written for the buyer side.

When a business gift card is the right call

A gift card is the correct choice more often than gifting content admits. Send one when any of these is true.

• Your recipients are spread across many countries. One physical item cannot ship to twelve markets at sensible cost and land in the same week. A card can.
• You do not know the people. New clients, a partner’s sales team, research participants, a list you inherited. Choosing for a stranger usually produces a worse gift than letting them choose.
• Choice is the respectful answer. Dietary requirements, religious observance, medical restrictions, recovery, personal circumstance. When you cannot ask and should not assume, handing the decision over is the considerate move, not the lazy one.
• The money is the mechanism. Sales incentives, rebate programmes, referral rewards, research payments. Cash equivalence is the point of the reward, so use the instrument that does that job.
• The deadline is real. A decision lands late, and a card arriving on time beats a better gift arriving in January.

If you are buying for your own staff and the send is seasonal, the sizing and timing questions change with headcount, and we have set those out in holiday gifts for employees by team size.

In every case above, send the card. The rest of this guide is about the sends where a card is a default rather than a decision.

Tax and admin: what most buyers find out after they have sent them

This part rarely appears on a vendor page, because vendors sell cards. It is also the part your payroll team will raise, so know it before the purchase order goes in.

United States. The IRS treats a gift card as cash. IRS Publication 15-B states that cash and cash equivalent fringe benefits, “for example, gift certificates, gift cards, and the use of a charge card or credit card”, are “never excludable as a de minimis benefit”, no matter how little. There is no small-value carve-out. A $25 card to an employee is taxable wages, it runs through payroll, and it shows on the W-2. If you want the recipient to keep the full face value you gross up, and the gross-up costs more than the card did. Budget for the card, then budget again for the tax on it.

United Kingdom. The trivial benefits exemption is the route most UK employers reach for, and it carries a condition that rules out most gift card sends. GOV.UK sets out the trivial benefits conditions: the benefit must have cost £50 or less to provide, and it must not be “cash or a cash voucher”. Directors of a close company are capped at £300 of trivial benefits in a tax year.

Where a voucher does not qualify, the reporting route depends on the type. HMRC splits cash vouchers from non-cash vouchers. For cash vouchers you add the value to the employee’s other earnings and deduct PAYE and Class 1 National Insurance through payroll. For non-cash vouchers you report the value on form P11D, and add the cost to earnings for Class 1 National Insurance through payroll, but not PAYE.

None of this makes a gift card a bad choice. It makes it an administered one. If 300 are going out, payroll needs to know in advance, not in January.

This is general information, not tax advice. Confirm the treatment for your own send with your accountant or payroll team before you buy.

The money that never gets spent

Part of the budget never reaches the recipient. Bankrate’s 2024 gift card survey found that more than 2 in 5 US adults, 43 percent, hold at least one unused gift card, gift voucher or store credit, worth $244 per person on average. Fieldwork ran from 19 to 21 August 2024.

Read that from the buyer’s side. You paid full face value on day one. A share of your recipients realised less than that, or nothing. The difference did not come back to you, and it did not reach the person you were thanking. It stayed with a retailer who had no part in the relationship.

US rules limit the erosion without removing it. Under Regulation E section 1005.20, the expiration date for the underlying funds must be at least five years after the card was issued or after funds were last loaded to it. A dormancy, inactivity or service fee may only be imposed where there has been no activity in the one-year period ending on the date the fee is charged, and no more than one such fee may be imposed in any calendar month.

So the funds are protected for a while, and after a year in a drawer the balance can still quietly drain. In the UK there is no equivalent single statutory minimum validity period, so validity and fees come down to each issuer’s terms. Read them before you buy in volume.

How much can you actually personalise a business gift card?

This is where the highest-volume versions of the search sit: custom business gift cards, personalized business gift cards, custom corporate gift cards, custom company gift cards. Four phrasings of the same question. The ceiling is worth naming plainly.

If you are issuing your own cards, personalisation is real. The card is your product, the design is yours, the balance is redeemable with you, and a printer will put your brand on the plastic. That is a custom card in the full sense.

If you are buying a third party’s balance to give away, personalisation is packaging. Brand the carrier or sleeve, print the envelope, write the email template, and at volume some programmes will print your logo on the card face. None of it changes what the gift is. Your recipient opens branded packaging and finds a balance at a retailer you picked for them.

One more detail nobody designs around: the amount is on the front. The recipient knows to the dollar what you spent before reading a word you wrote. Almost every other kind of gift keeps that private.

That is not a reason to avoid gift cards. It is a reason to be clear about what you are buying. If admin load is your real constraint rather than personalisation, the mechanics of sending gifts to a whole team in bulk are worth reading before you lock the format.

Why a gift card feels transactional, even when the amount is generous

Three mechanics, none of them about your intentions.

The value is stated on the front. A gift is usually the one transaction where the price stays hidden. A card makes it the headline.

A second transaction has to happen. The card is not the gift. The gift is whatever the recipient buys later, in their own time, at a shop you chose for them. Until that happens, you have handed someone an errand.

It ends at zero. The moment the balance is spent, the gift is over, and so is any memory of who sent it.

That is also why two tax authorities classify these as pay. They behave like pay.

For a rebate or a survey incentive, none of that matters. It matters when the relationship is the actual point, which is usually the case with clients. If that is your send, Christmas gifts for clients that keep growing covers what works in place of a balance.

A gift card says buy yourself something. A Tree Gift says this is for you.

A Tree Gift is a tree planted in the recipient’s name in Tanzania, with your message attached to it.

You send it. They plant it, or they follow the one planted for them. They remember who sent it, because six months later it is still there.

Two delivery formats. A physical Tree Kit arrives as a small box with seeds, soil and instructions, and it grows on a desk or in a garden. A digital Gift Story arrives by email, instantly, anywhere in the world, with no shipping address and no customs form, which makes it the functional equivalent of an eGift card in delivery terms. What it carries is the difference. You can send a Gift Story by email with a written message sitting where the balance would be.

No redemption step. Nothing to spend. Nothing to expire.

If you are scoping a corporate send for this year, see corporate Tree Gifts.

What a Tree Gift costs, and what the recipient and the buyer actually get

Pricing, plainly.

• Trees are $1 per tree. Always, at any quantity. There is no volume discount and there never has been.
• A single Tree Kit is $12, and bulk pricing is lower.
• The 100-gift pilot is $100 flat, which is how most first corporate sends get tested before anyone commits to a full list.
• At giftstory.ai, creating the message is free and the first send is free on a one-tree credit. Every send after that plants at least one tree at $1 per tree.

What the recipient gets: a tree planted in their name, the message you wrote, and something they can follow as it grows.

What the buying company gets: a Forest Profile with a live tree count, CO2 and oxygen estimates, paid work hours created, land reforested, and planting updates from the sites. That is what you take back to whoever signed off the budget.

To be clear about what it is not: we do not offer per-tree GPS tracking, blockchain records, IoT sensors or satellite monitoring to customers. Any supplier promising that at a dollar a tree is worth a second question.

On carbon, our Working Trees field study measures roughly 0.025 tonnes, 25kg, of CO2 per tree per year, with a 30 percent uncertainty discount already applied, and roughly 1 tonne over a lifetime of about 40 years. Those numbers are field-measured rather than a carbon credit, and planting trees is a contribution to verified reforestation rather than compensation for anyone’s emissions. The method is public, so you can read the FN impact methodology and check it yourself.

Choosing between them: a straight decision guide

Send a gift card when:

• You do not know the recipients well enough to choose for them.
• They are spread across many countries and currencies.
• The occasion calls for choice, whether for dietary, religious, medical or personal reasons.
• The reward is a rebate, an incentive or a payment by another name.
• The deadline has already passed and speed beats everything else.

Send something that carries a message when:

• You want the person to remember who sent it.
• The relationship is the point rather than the transaction.
• You will be gifting the same people again next year, and each send should build on the last.
• Your recipients already receive cards from four other suppliers and yours will not be distinguishable from theirs.

Both are legitimate answers. A buyer who can say why they chose one over the other will defend the decision easily, whichever way it went.

Deciding in September, sending in November

The corporate gifting decision peaks in November. The work that decides its quality happens in September.

Here is where the lead time goes. Budget sign-off takes longer than the decision itself. Recipient lists need cleaning and are always out of date. Personalisation, whether a branded carrier or 300 individual messages, has to be written by a person. Physical stock needs a production and shipping window clear of the December freight peak. Payroll needs warning if the send is taxable.

Starting in September leaves you room to choose. Starting in November leaves you with whatever ships fastest, which is how a lot of companies end up sending gift cards they never really chose.

If your send is seasonal, the full corporate Christmas gifts guide covers formats, budgets and timing across the whole Q4 decision. If you want to see how the tree side works at corporate volumes, you can gift a forest to your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are business gift cards taxable to employees?

In the US, yes. The IRS treats gift cards as cash equivalent fringe benefits, which are never excludable as de minimis benefits however small the value, so the face value is taxable wages and runs through payroll. In the UK, the trivial benefits exemption requires the benefit to have cost £50 or less and not to be cash or a cash voucher, so most gift card sends fall outside it and are reported through payroll or on a P11D depending on the voucher type. This is general information rather than tax advice, so confirm your position with your accountant.

What is the difference between a business gift card and a corporate gift card?

In practice they describe the same thing: cards a company buys and gives to employees, clients or partners. “Corporate” signals larger volumes and a managed programme, “business” is used more loosely. The real ambiguity is that small business owners also search “business gift cards” wanting to issue their own branded cards redeemable at their shop, a different product entirely. Check which one a vendor is selling before you compare prices.

Can you put your company logo on a business gift card?

Usually on the packaging, sometimes on the card itself. Branded carriers, sleeves, envelopes and email templates are standard, and at volume some programmes print your logo on the card face. What you cannot change is the underlying gift, which stays a balance at whichever retailer or network issued it. If you want a card carrying your own brand that customers redeem with you, that comes from a card printer or your point of sale system.

Do business gift cards expire?

In the US, Regulation E requires the underlying funds to stay valid for at least five years from issue or from the last load, and limits dormancy, inactivity or service fees to no more than one per calendar month, and only after a full year with no activity. In the UK there is no equivalent single statutory minimum validity period, so the issuer’s terms decide it. Read them before you buy a large batch, because they vary widely.

How much should you put on a business gift card?

Set the amount by the job the gift is doing. For an incentive or rebate, size it to the behaviour you are rewarding and to what the recipient would consider worth the effort. For a thank you, remember the number is printed on the front, so it talks before your message does, and a bigger number will not repair a format that already told the recipient you handed the decision back. Decide the budget by occasion first, then pick the format that fits it.

What can a small business send instead of gift cards?

Anything where the gift itself carries the message rather than a balance. A tree planted in the recipient’s name works at any quantity, including one. Trees are $1 per tree with no volume discount, a single Tree Kit is $12 and bulk pricing is lower, and a digital Gift Story sends by email with no shipping address, which suits remote teams and overseas clients. Creating the message is free and the first send is free, so you can test it on one recipient before you scale.