Unclaimed: gift card value in the US, 2026

Bankrate has asked the same question four years running. The share of adults holding an unused card has stayed roughly flat, but the amount on those cards has more than doubled: $116 in 2021, $244 in 2024. The median holding is $100, so the average is pulled up by a long tail of larger balances.

Losses are not only forgetfulness. More than one in three adults, 34%, say they have lost money to a gift card misstep: 20% let a card expire, 17% lost the card outright, and 12% had the store close before they could spend it.

The pattern is skewed by income. 55% of households earning $100,000 or more hold an unused card, averaging $348, against 35% of households under $50,000, averaging $180. Millennials carry the largest balances of any generation at $332 per person.

All figures from the same Bankrate/YouGov series. Non-probability online sample, weighted to be nationally representative; year-over-year changes of a few points sit inside normal survey noise.

Among US adults who hold at least one unused gift card, voucher or store credit. Source: Bankrate/YouGov, four annual waves, latest fielded August 2024.

Unclaimed property law is the mechanism that is supposed to catch forgotten money, and for gift cards it mostly does not apply. According to Alston & Bird’s October 2025 review, 37 states either expressly exempt gift cards and gift certificates from escheatment or have no law requiring it, including California, Illinois, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Many of those exemptions are conditional on the card carrying no expiration date and no inactivity fees.

The remaining 14 jurisdictions, including Delaware, the District of Columbia, Georgia, New Jersey and New York, do require escheatment after a set dormancy period. Several let the issuer keep a percentage of the balance; Georgia and New York require the full remaining face value to be turned over. Alston & Bird recorded no state legislation changing gift card escheatment during 2025.

Two practical consequences follow. First, most balances never enter a public database a consumer could search. Second, where they do, the claim usually files under the issuer’s state of incorporation rather than the cardholder’s, because issuers generally do not record who bought the card. Baker Tilly notes that an exemption from reporting does not extinguish the debt: the balance is still owed to the cardholder, it simply has no state intermediary chasing it.

For a sense of the scale on the corporate side of the ledger, Starbucks held $1.85 billion in stored value card and loyalty balances at the end of its March 2025 quarter, and recognised $187.6 million of breakage revenue in company-operated stores plus roughly $20 million in licensed stores in the prior year: money customers loaded and never spent, booked as revenue.

“Stores such as Walmart and Starbucks have more than $1 billion in unused gift cards on their books.”

Ted Rossman, Bankrate senior analyst, September 2024

The relevant comparison is not the national total but the household one. Bankrate’s 2026 emergency savings report found only 47% of Americans have the liquidity to cover a $1,000 emergency expense, and 29% now carry more credit card debt than emergency savings. Asked what would happen if household income stopped tomorrow, 43% said they would be very worried about covering the next month.

The Federal Reserve’s 2025 survey of household economic wellbeing puts the lower bar at 63% of adults able to cover a $400 expense with cash or a card paid off at the next statement, a share that has not moved in three years and sits below its 2021 high of 68%.

The balance sheet behind those answers has deteriorated. Credit card debt reached $1.28 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 5.5% year over year, while the personal savings rate fell to 4.0% in the first quarter of 2026 from 6.2% in early 2024. Delinquency has followed: 4.8% of all household debt was in the late-payment pipeline at the end of 2025, and the Student Borrower Protection Center reported in May 2026 that the share of Americans behind on consumer debts had hit record highs, with credit card delinquency near its 2008-crisis peak.

Against that, a $244 average card balance clears the $100 Bankrate median twice over and sits between the two standard emergency-expense benchmarks. Roughly a quarter of all US household debt now carries an APR above 21%, per Debt.com’s 2026 survey, which means recovered card value spent against a balance is worth more than its face amount.

One widely circulated figure, a 13.12% 90-day credit card delinquency rate in Q1 2026, appears in secondary coverage attributed to the New York Fed but we could not confirm it in the Fed’s own release. It is excluded here. The Fed and Bankrate emergency-expense figures ask different questions ($400 vs $1,000) and are not interchangeable.

Yellow bars are measured card balances (Bankrate/YouGov, August 2024). Ruled bars are the emergency-expense thresholds used by the Federal Reserve’s 2025 SHED and Bankrate’s 2026 emergency savings report. Only 47% of adults could meet the $1,000 line from savings; 63% could meet the $400 line.

The clearest evidence that small sums have become worth chasing is how much effort people now spend on them. Omnisend’s March 2026 survey of 1,370 US respondents found 28% have a side hustle or second income stream, and 49% of those started theirs within the past year. Financial need was the stated reason for 80%. Bankrate’s own side hustle survey puts the figure at roughly one in four adults, most earning a few hundred dollars a month.

The most common form is selling: 41% of American side hustlers are selling or reselling products online, most often handmade goods (26%) or second-hand and vintage items (18%). 86% spend under 20 hours a week on it, with 5 to 9 hours the most common band. A $244 recovery is a meaningful fraction of a month’s take for most of these people, for none of the hours.

Gift cards themselves have quietly become a budgeting instrument rather than only a gift. Capital One Shopping’s 2026 compilation reports that 50% of consumers used gift cards as a budgeting strategy in 2025 and 77% found budgeting easier with them, which cuts both ways: more cards in circulation, and more of them partly spent and set aside.

Where consumers do act on an unused card, resale is the established route and it is lossy. Bankrate’s analyst describes selling on a platform such as CardCash or Raise as typically returning 70 to 80% of face value. 7% of adults report having resold a card. On a $244 balance, that discount is $49 to $73 of the recovery given up.

The link between affordability strain and gift card recovery specifically is an inference, not a measured finding: no source we found tracks recovery attempts against financial stress. The behaviour data above establishes that consumers are actively pursuing small sums, not that they are pursuing these ones.

Side hustle figures: Omnisend/Cint, March 2026, 1,370 US respondents. Budgeting and resale figures: Capital One Shopping’s 2026 compilation and Bankrate, respectively. Commercial survey research, not official statistics.