Gift Card Expiry Dates and Your Rights in the UK

A gift card feels like money. It is printed like money, it is given like money, and it sits in your wallet next to money.

It is not money. It is a promise from a company, and promises have terms — and expiry dates, and a nasty habit of evaporating when the company that made them stops trading. Here is where you actually stand in the UK, including the part nobody mentions when they hand you the card.

How long does a UK gift card last?

Usually 12 to 24 months from purchase. Some run longer, a few run shorter, and a handful of digital brands never expire at all.

The important thing to understand is that this is not set by law. There is no UK statute requiring a minimum life for a gift card. The expiry date is whatever the issuer wrote into its own terms and conditions when it sold you the card.

That means the answer to "how long does my card last" is always the same: read the back of the card. The date is generally in small print, and it is generally not where you would look for it.

Some rough guidance on the brands we see most:

• Steam wallet credit — does not expire.
• Amazon.co.uk vouchers — long-dated; check the terms on your specific voucher.
• Apple, Xbox, PlayStation — once redeemed to an account balance, the credit generally persists; the unredeemed card is the thing with the shelf life.
• High-street retail cards — this is where the 12-to-24-month clock is most common, and where most money is lost.

Do not take a blog post's word for it, including this one. Look at your card.

Is the expiry date actually enforceable?

Mostly, yes. And that is an unsatisfying answer, so let us be precise about where the edges are.

A gift card is a contract, and the expiry is a term of that contract. If it was clearly disclosed to you at the point of purchase, it is very likely enforceable.

However, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 says that a term in a consumer contract is not binding if it is unfair — broadly, if it creates a significant imbalance to the consumer's detriment, contrary to good faith. An expiry period so short, or so poorly disclosed, that it effectively lets the retailer keep your money for nothing could in principle be challenged on that basis.

In practice this is rarely tested, and we are not going to pretend that waving the Consumer Rights Act at a shop assistant will get you far. Some retailers will honour a recently-expired card as a goodwill gesture if you ask politely; many will not, and they are usually within their rights.

The practical position: treat the expiry date as real. If you think a term was genuinely unfair or hidden, you can raise it with the retailer and, if you get nowhere, with Citizens Advice, who can refer matters to Trading Standards.

The part that catches people out: administration

This is the one that actually costs British consumers serious money, and it is worth understanding before it happens to you rather than after.

When a retailer goes into administration, gift cards do not become a protected asset. Legally, you are an unsecured creditor — you are owed money by a company that cannot pay everybody. You join a queue, and unsecured creditors are at the back of it, behind the banks, behind the tax authorities, behind the employees.

What happens next varies, and none of the outcomes are good:

• The administrators stop accepting gift cards immediately, and your card is worth nothing.
• They accept cards, but only if you spend an equal amount of your own money at the same time — "50% redemption", a common and rather galling arrangement.
• A buyer rescues the business and chooses to honour the cards, out of goodwill and a wish to keep customers. This does happen. It is not a right.

You will usually get no warning. By the time administration is announced publicly, the tills have often already stopped taking vouchers.

There is no compensation scheme for this. Gift cards are not protected the way bank deposits are protected by the FSCS. If the company folds, the money is simply gone.

What this means in practice

Three plain conclusions follow from all of the above.

1. A gift card is a depreciating asset. Every month it sits in your drawer it is closer to expiry, and every month it carries the risk that the issuer stops trading. It does not earn interest. It only loses.

2. Spending it beats everything. If you or anyone in your household will genuinely use the card, use it. Face value is 100%, which is more than any resale rate will ever be. We will happily buy your card, but we would rather say this honestly than pretend otherwise.

3. If you will not use it, do not sit on it. The two ways a gift card becomes worthless — expiry and insolvency — both reward acting early and punish waiting. A card sold at 84% today is worth infinitely more than the same card, expired, in eighteen months.

Selling before the clock runs out

If you have decided you will not use a card, check what it is worth. Steam and Razer Gold pay 90%, Amazon 89%, Apple and the consoles 84%, most retail cards 74%.

Cards close to expiry are still fine to sell — what matters to us is the balance, not the date, provided the card is still valid at the point we verify it. But do not leave it until the final week: verification takes up to 24 hours, and a card that expires during the process is a card nobody can do anything with.

Not sure what is left on the card? Here is how to check a gift card balance — and note that for Apple, Steam and PSN, you cannot check without redeeming, which makes the card unsellable. Do not redeem "just to look".