Gift cards continue to be a popular present, with more consumers increasingly using them to buy everyday essentials, leaving fewer unused and forgotten in the back of a drawer.
A new survey from CivicScience found that the most popular use of holiday gift cards was spending on essentials, such as gas and groceries—rising from 36% in 2023 to 38% in 2024.
A related trend shows that consumers are increasingly less likely to leave these cards unused. According to CivicScience, 39% of respondents said they aren’t sitting on any gift card balances, compared to 35% who said the same in 2023.
The results underscore a larger trend that has become apparent in the world of prepaid cards: consumers increasingly view them as a form of currency, no different from a $20 bill.
“This trend aligns with the stored value cycle that we’ve identified,” said Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Prepaid at Javelin Strategy & Research. “These cards are just augmenting people’s personal spending habits, even when they get them as a gift.”
Javelin’s research has found that nearly 60% of consumers use the entire value of a gift card in a single shopping trip. Over a third end up spending more than the value of that card, using it to augment a purchase they already planned to make, like a larger TV than they initially expected to buy.
Cards Are Being Spent Down
While data indicates that there is often a significant amount of unused money left on gift cards, this is due to a handful of outliers.
On physical gift cards, the average money left over is $11, while the median is just 70 cents. For digital gift cards, the pattern differs: the average leftover balance is $9.58, but the median is zero.
“On a physical card, there’s no easy way to know how much money you have left over,” said Hirschfield. “On a digital card, you always see the remaining balance. The digital trend is driving the ability to be more efficient with these cards. The closer we get to that, the more people will spend to zero.”
Hirschfield added that the idea of issuers wanting gift cards to remain unspent is a myth. “Companies want people to spend the entire value of the card,” he said. “They bring in foot traffic, they create loyal customers—and they let people spend more.”