“No gifts, please”: what is measured and what is not

Search this and you get wording. Eight pages of it, all agreeing: "Your presence is the only gift we need." "Please, no gifts — consider a donation instead." "The gift of your presence is enough."

The wording is the easy part. You could write that sentence yourself in a minute. What nobody on that page of results tells you is whether saying it works, whether it will read as strange, and what the person on the other end is likely to do with it.

Some of that is measured. Some of it is not, and we will be clear about which is which.

One in three people are already doing this

The only national survey we have found that measures gift-giving attitudes alongside amounts is Empower's, fielded 19–21 August 2025 among 2,202 US adults and weighted to be nationally representative. Four of its findings bear directly on this question:

The first number is the one that answers the anxiety behind the question. Asking for no gifts is not an eccentric request that will mark you out. About a third of people have already done it this year. Whoever reads your invitation has a one-in-three chance of having made the same request themselves.

The last number matters for a different reason. If 86% of people already agree that a gift need not be expensive, the objection you are bracing for — that you are refusing something meaningful — is not one most guests actually hold.

What is not measured, and we will not guess it

Whether people comply. No survey we could find asks whether a "no gifts" request was honoured. Every page telling you it "usually works" or that guests "will bring something anyway" is reporting an impression. Some of those impressions are probably right. None of them is a measurement, and we are not going to add a ninth confident guess to the pile.

Whether the donation version lands better. "In lieu of gifts, donate to X" is the most-repeated alternative in the search results and there is no published figure on how often it is followed, or how it is received.

Anything outside the US. The survey is American. If you are in the UK or Ireland — and a lot of people asking this are — the norms may differ and we have not measured them.

The part that is arithmetic rather than etiquette

If the request is honoured, here is what it is worth to the people you invited, using the going rates from the same survey:

• $55.65 per person, for an adult's birthday gift.
• $83.03 per person, for a child's.

That second figure is why the request lands differently at a child's party. Ten children invited is somewhere around $830 of other families' money, and a no-gifts line removes it. It also removes the part nobody says out loud: the guest who cannot comfortably spend $83 and does not want that visible.

Which reframes the request. It is usually made to reduce clutter. Measured in money, it is also the host quietly taking a cost off a room full of people, and the ones for whom that cost was real are the ones least able to say so.

The one thing the numbers cannot settle

A guest's risk and a host's request are not the same risk.

You are asking for less. Your guest is deciding whether to be the only person who arrives empty-handed — and that is not a question about your preference, it is a question about what everybody else does. Your sentence does not remove that risk. It moves it onto a guess about the other guests.

The 33% figure is the only thing that helps here, and it helps in a specific way: the request is now common enough that a guest complying with it is unlikely to be alone. Say it once, plainly, and say it in the invitation rather than in a reply to someone who has already asked what to bring — by then they have already started worrying about it.

And if someone brings something anyway, the useful thing to know is that they were not ignoring you. They were solving their problem, not yours.