How much money to give for a birthday

There is one published number, and it is the opposite of what most people expect.

According to the only national survey that publishes a going rate for birthday gifts, Americans spend $83.03 on a gift for a child and $55.65 on a gift for an adult. The child gets more. Not a little more — about 49% more.

That single fact is most of what the published data can tell you, and it is worth sitting with before reading the rest of this page, because almost every other page answering this question tells you the opposite.

The number, and exactly what it measures

Empower's "Going Rate" study was fielded 19–21 August 2025 among 2,202 US adults and weighted to be nationally representative.

| What is being bought | Going rate | |---|---| | Birthday gift, child | $83.03 | | Birthday gift, adult | $55.65 | | Wedding gift | $85.18 | | Holiday gift, per person | $64.10 | | Mother's Day | $55.25 | | Valentine's Day | $50.69 | | Father's Day | $38.48 | | Teacher or coach | $15.00 |

Two things about this table matter more than the numbers in it.

It measures gift spending, not cash handed over. The survey asks what people spend on a gift. It does not ask what people put in a card. We are using it to answer a question about money because it is the closest published measurement that exists — but a gift and an envelope are not read the same way by the person receiving them, and no survey we could find measures the envelope.

Children and adults are the only two groups it separates. There is no figure for a nine-year-old, a thirteen-year-old or a sixteen-year-old. There is "child" and there is "adult", and the survey does not say where the line falls.

So where do all the per-age tables come from?

Search this question and you will find confident tables: $20 for a ten-year-old, $50 for a sixteenth, $100 for an eighteenth. They look researched. They are not.

The top results for this question, at the time of writing, are a Quora thread, a Reddit thread, a Facebook group post, an AI-generated calculator, and a bank's budgeting blog. That is not a criticism of any of them — the Reddit answers in particular are often thoughtful, and a room full of people describing what they actually do is real information of a kind.

But it is crowd opinion, not measurement, and the difference shows up in a specific way: the confident tables disagree with the one measurement that exists. They almost all step the amount up with age. The published data does the reverse.

We do not know which is right. We know which one has a sample size.

Answering the questions people actually ask

These come up constantly, so here they are against the published figure rather than against a feeling.

Is $100 too much for a birthday gift? For an adult it is about 1.8× the going rate; for a child, about 1.2×. So it is above the norm for an adult and close to it for a child. "Too much" depends on whether being noticeably above the norm is what you want — sometimes it is.

Is $150 enough? It is roughly 2.7× the adult going rate. By any published measure it is generous, and if the question behind the question is "will this look stingy", the data says no.

Is $200 a good birthday present? It is about 3.6× the adult going rate and more than twice the going rate for a wedding gift. There may be excellent reasons to give it. The norm is not one of them.

Is $500 a lot for a birthday party? We have no published figure for party spending at all, and will not invent one. This page is about the gift.

What the number cannot do

• It is self-reported. People say what they spend; nobody observed the purchases. Self-reports about socially visible spending tend to come out tidier than reality.
• It is American. A meaningful share of people asking this question are in the UK and Ireland, and nothing here transfers. Their norms may be quite different and we have not measured them.
• It is one survey. One well-run survey beats a chain of sites citing each other, but it is still a single measurement.
• It does not know your situation. A going rate describes a population. It does not know the relationship, the income on either side, or whether this person would rather have the thing than the envelope.

The one thing the same survey says that is worth more than the number

Asked about gifting in general, 86% agreed that a gift can be meaningful without being expensive, 48% reported gift fatigue, and 33% said they were adopting a no-gifts policy this year.

If you came here worried that your amount is too small, that is the finding to take away. The anxiety this question is usually made of — that the number will be read as a measure of how much you care — is not shared by most of the people you would be giving to.