The exception: a milestone or a leaving present
The ceiling described elsewhere on this page has one clear exception. A retirement, a departure after years, or a landmark birthday moves the gift into a different category, and the small-and-safe rule stops applying.
Against what people spend
The typical amount falls inside this range: $55.65 on average, per Empower (2025), against a range of $40–$100. Spend at the lower end and you are spending what most people spend.
This is the national figure for an adult's birthday gift, not a breakdown for a colleague — no published survey we could find breaks spending down by relationship, and the per-relationship numbers you will see elsewhere carry no source.
Why the rule changes here
The obligation problem exists because the relationship continues. At a departure it does not — nobody is going to feel they owe a favour to someone they will not see again. That single fact is what makes a larger gift appropriate, and it is why leaving presents are traditionally more generous than birthday ones.
For a landmark birthday of a long-standing colleague, the same logic applies partially: the occasion is public and shared, which dilutes the individual charge.
What works at this level
Something that marks the time rather than the person's taste: a good bottle if you know it is welcome, something related to what they are going to next, something the whole team can sign. Forty to a hundred dollars from a group is comfortable and does not put anybody in an awkward position.
What makes it fail
Turning it into a private gift with a group label. If one person chose and paid for most of it, the group framing is fiction and everybody can tell.
Marking a departure that is not voluntary is the harder failure. Redundancy and dismissal are not occasions, and a present can read as a consolation prize. A card and a genuine sentence is the whole of what is appropriate there.
When this is the wrong gift
Not for a departure that was not their choice. Redundancy or dismissal is not a milestone, and a gift can land as pity. A card, honestly written, is the correct and sufficient response.
Not from one person at this level. Above the ordinary band, a gift needs a group behind it, or it becomes exactly the individual obligation the rest of this page is about avoiding.
Not if the milestone is their age and they have not made it public. Landmark birthdays are only occasions for people who treat them as such, and at work the safest assumption is that they do not.
Other ideas for the same person
Sources
How these figures are produced: see our methodology.
Price ranges are our own dated estimates of what a category costs unless a published price is linked. They are not offers, and they are not a guarantee of what anything costs today — check before you buy.