Gifting Market Statistics for 2027

Last updated: August 2026. All figures link to their original source at the bottom of this page.

How much does the world spend on gifts? The honest answer: it depends on who is counting, and the gap between counts is enormous. One research firm puts global gift retail at roughly $509 billion for 2026. Another, drawing a much narrower box around the same behavior, says $100 billion. Both are defensible. They just measure different things, and most statistics pages quietly mix them together.

This page collects the gifting market statistics we could actually verify heading into 2027: overall market size, holiday and occasion spending, corporate gifting, gift cards, and the trends that keep showing up in survey after survey. Where a published report gives a real 2027 figure, we use it. Where we calculated a 2027 estimate ourselves from a publisher’s own growth rate, we say so plainly instead of passing it off as a report number.

How big is the gifting market in 2026 and 2027?

There is no single answer, because research firms define the market differently. Fortune Business Insights measures broad gift retailing, everything sold through gift-oriented retail, and lands on $491.82 billion for 2025, growing to $678.08 billion by 2034 at a 3.64% CAGR. Mordor Intelligence tracks a narrower gift retailing category and puts 2026 at $100.33 billion. For Insights Consultancy measures the gifting market as a purchase occasion, personal plus corporate, and forecasts growth from $171 billion in 2026 to $300.8 billion by 2030, a much faster 10.4% CAGR.

A five-fold spread between the largest and smallest estimate sounds like someone must be wrong. Usually nobody is. One firm counts souvenir shops and seasonal decor, another counts only items bought explicitly as gifts, a third folds in e-gift vouchers. The practical rule for anyone using these numbers: cite the publisher with the figure, and never average across reports.

Gift market forecasts with actual 2027 numbers

A handful of reports do put a hard number on 2027 itself. Three worth knowing:

Worth noting: the personalized gifts forecast dates from before the post-2022 personalization boom, and newer reports run higher. SkyQuest now sizes personalized gifts at $26.1 billion in 2024, heading to $50.04 billion by 2033 at 7.5% a year. In the US alone, Research and Markets projects personalized gifting will grow from $9.69 billion in 2024 to $14.56 billion by 2030.

Gift market share by region

Europe is the largest gift retailing region with 37.76% of global revenue in 2025, worth $185.71 billion, followed by North America at 27.88% ($137.12 billion) and Asia-Pacific at 18.42% ($90.59 billion), per Fortune Business Insights. The growth story sits elsewhere, though: Mordor Intelligence names the Middle East and Africa the fastest-growing region at an 8.23% CAGR through 2031, and Technavio flags Asia-Pacific as the fastest-growing major market.

Holiday and occasion gift spending statistics

The 2025 winter season was a milestone for US retail: NRF expected November–December sales of $1.01 to $1.02 trillion, the first holiday season ever to clear $1 trillion, up from $976.1 billion in 2024. The average consumer budgeted $890 for gifts, food, decorations and other seasonal items, the second-highest figure in the survey’s 23-year history. 91% of Americans planned to celebrate, and roughly two in five started shopping before November.

The big shopping days keep getting bigger. A record 202.9 million people shopped over the five days from Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday in 2025, with 80.3 million in stores on Black Friday and 75.9 million online on Cyber Monday. Super Saturday, the last Saturday before Christmas, drew shopping plans from another 158.9 million. As for what actually ends up under the tree, the most recent detailed NRF category survey had clothing on 56% of shopping lists, gift cards on 44% and toys on 37%. Deloitte adds that the average Thanksgiving-to-Cyber-Monday budget was $622 in 2025, down 4% on the year. And all of this happened while 85% of consumers said they expected tariffs to push gift prices up. People grumbled about prices, then spent anyway.

Every major gifting occasion set a spending record in 2026:

A few details behind those records. Mother’s Day 2026 was led by jewelry at $7.5 billion, with 45% of gift-givers buying it. Valentine’s Day 2026 included a record 35% of consumers buying gifts for their pets, worth $2.1 billion. Candy remains the most-bought Valentine’s gift at 56% of givers, but the money goes elsewhere: jewelry took $7 billion of the total and evenings out another $6.3 billion. For Father’s Day, greeting cards (60%) and clothing (58%) topped the list, and 45% of shoppers said they were interested in subscription-box gifts. If you are planning around these occasions, our gift guides break down ideas by budget and recipient.

Outside the US, the pattern holds. UK shoppers spent £24.6 billion on Christmas presents and celebrations in 2025, £461 per adult, and bought 64% of their presents online, according to PwC UK. Food and drink is the one category Britons planned to spend more on, named by 27%. Gallup’s US polling, which asks about gifts only, found Americans planning to spend $1,007 on holiday presents in 2025. Deloitte’s broader measure, which folds in travel and entertaining, came to $1,595 per shopper.

For other occasions, the data thins out but two numbers stand up: wedding guests spend about $150 per gift on average per The Knot, and in a LendingTree survey 49% of Americans named birthdays as the occasion they spend the most on.

Corporate gifting statistics

The Business Research Company values corporate gifting at $886.56 billion in 2025 and $956.93 billion in 2026, projecting $1.31 trillion by 2030 at an 8.2% CAGR. One caveat we would rather flag than bury: that figure covers a very broad definition of business gifting spend, and it dwarfs older, narrower estimates. Coresight Research and GiftNow, measuring the US corporate gifting market specifically, projected growth from $242 billion in 2021 to $306 billion by 2024 at an 8.1% CAGR. The dollar totals disagree; the roughly 8% annual growth rate shows up in both.

What companies actually spend per person is more concrete. An Advertising Specialty Institute survey of decision-makers found holiday gift budgets averaging $42 per employee and $26 per client, with about 80% of companies putting their logo on the gift. Coresight’s earlier work put typical US allocations at $75 to $125 per employee. For structured reward programs the numbers run higher still: the Incentive Research Foundation reports average non-cash reward spend of $866 per participant per year in North America.

Does any of it work? The retention data says yes, with conditions. A Gallup and Workhuman study tracking 3,500 employees found that people who felt well recognized were 45% less likely to have left their organization two years later. In Snappy’s 2026 workforce study, 72% of employees said a work-anniversary gift would make them more likely to stay, yet only 47% had ever received one. The same study found 54% of employees would rather get a gift card than a physical item, and 73% called personalization the single most important factor in a meaningful gift. The habit is institutional now: 61% of corporations build gifting into their marketing or HR strategy, 52% send gifts to existing clients through the year rather than only in December, and in a Tremendous survey of 1,500 employees, 75% said a holiday gift raised their job satisfaction, with 46% still feeling the effect a year later. The failure mode is well documented too: ING research suggests around 40% of corporate gifts, mostly cheap and impersonal ones, end up in the trash. Choosing something people keep is the whole game, which is why we maintain a separate guide to corporate gifts that do not get binned.

Gift card statistics

Gift cards are the biggest single number on this page. Precedence Research values the global market at $1.24 trillion in 2025 and $1.42 trillion in 2026, on its way to $4.23 trillion by 2035 at a 13.06% CAGR. The US accounts for roughly $507.1 billion of the 2026 total, projected to reach $782 billion by 2030 (intermediate-year figures from the same Precedence dataset, as cited by Capital One Shopping). North America holds 46.71% of the global market. Within all of that, e-gift cards are the fastest-moving piece, growing at 16.23% a year.

Consumer behavior around gift cards is a study in good intentions. In the 2025 holiday season, 43% of US shoppers planned to buy at least one, spending an expected $29 billion and making gift cards the number-two gift category, per NRF. Then a lot of that value just sits there: Capital One Shopping’s analysis finds Americans hold about $23 billion in unused gift cards, with 43% of adults carrying at least one unused card averaging $244. To be fair to recipients, 63% of people who get a card do spend it within a month. The rest fund the breakage line on retailer income statements, and 71% of people admit they have held onto a card for more than a year at some point. Generations behave differently here too: Millennials spend the most on gift cards at $456 a year, Gen Z the least at $211, and 64% of all cards bought are closed-loop, tied to a single store. If you would rather your card get used, pairing it with something small and physical helps, and so does picking a retailer the person actually shops at; our gift card deals page tracks discounted cards worth giving.

One methodology note: publishers define this market very differently too. Fortune Business Insights puts the 2026 gift card total at $1.49 trillion, MarkWide Research at $892 billion, and Persistence Market Research at $825 billion. The direction is unanimous, the level is not.

Gifting trends to watch through 2027

Experiences are beating things, by a lot

GetYourGuide has run the same Wakefield Research survey for three years, which makes it one of the few real trend lines in gifting data. In 2021, 62% of Americans said they would rather receive an experience than a physical gift. In 2022 it was 77%. By the third wave, 92%. Asked what kind, half wanted concert or show tickets, 63% said they would enjoy being surprised with travel, and 87% named family the hardest people to shop for, which may explain the appeal of just booking something. And yet 90% of people said they still typically receive physical gifts. That gap between what people want and what they get is arguably the biggest open opportunity in the industry.

Personalization keeps compounding

Every sizing of the personalized gifts market shows steady growth: $38.66 billion by 2027 in the older Market Research Future forecast, $26.1 billion in 2024 heading to $50.04 billion by 2033 per SkyQuest, and a US market growing from $9.69 billion to a projected $14.56 billion between 2024 and 2030. The behavioral data backs the sizing: in Snappy’s workforce research, 73% of recipients said personalization matters more than anything else about a gift. Research houses credit the pull to Millennial and Gen Z buyers, who reach for seasonal, event-based and name-on-it gifts far more readily than older shoppers.

Self-gifting went mainstream

NIQ’s holiday 2025 research found more than half of shoppers planning to buy gifts for themselves, led by Millennials and Gen Z, and 53% of tech buyers admitted the electronics in their cart were for themselves rather than anyone else. Blackhawk Network data points the same way from the gift card side: 66% of digital gift cards are bought for self-use. The bill shows up later: Horizon Media found holiday shoppers overspent their plans by $28 a head in 2023, and 60% of Americans took on extra credit card debt to get through the season. Retailers have started treating self-gifters as a customer segment in their own right, because that is what the numbers say they are.

Gift discovery moved to social feeds

In an MGH survey, 55% of consumers said they found holiday gift ideas on TikTok, and 37% had bought a gift for someone else there. EMarketer estimates TikTok Shop alone makes up nearly 20% of US social commerce in 2025. For younger shoppers the feed is the mall: 46% of Gen Z use social media for gift inspiration, per NIQ.

AI entered the gift aisle

Checkout.com’s December 2025 research called it the first AI Christmas: 47% of consumers planned to use AI agents for holiday shopping, and 49% had already used AI to help choose a gift for a partner, rising to 70% among 25-to-34-year-olds. Deloitte’s 2025 holiday survey found 33% of shoppers using generative AI in their shopping journey, more than double the year before. Expect the 2027 numbers to make these look small.

Sustainability shapes choices, quietly

In the Center for Biological Diversity’s survey, 67% of Americans said they consider environmental impact before buying gifts, 76% were likely to shop local small businesses, and 90% wished the holidays were less materialistic, up from 78% when the question was first asked in 2005. Openness to alternatives runs broader than the eco label suggests: 69% would happily receive handmade gifts, 56% secondhand ones, and 60% a charity donation made in their name. There is a waste angle behind all of it, too: US household garbage runs about 23% higher in December than in an ordinary month. Those attitudes do not always survive contact with a Black Friday deal, but they are reshaping what sells: PPAI counts sustainable products at $3.8 billion, already 14% of US promotional product sales.

Frequently asked questions

Methodology

We compiled this page in August 2026 from publicly available market research reports, retail federation surveys and consumer studies, keeping only figures we could trace to a named publisher and link directly. Where publishers disagree, we show the competing figures side by side rather than averaging them, because the disagreements come from different market definitions, not measurement error. Any 2027 value marked as an estimate is our own calculation, made by applying a publisher’s stated CAGR to its most recent published figure. We excluded statistics from aggregator pages whose numbers could not be traced to a primary source.

Sources

1. Fortune Business Insights — Gift Retailing Market
2. Mordor Intelligence — Gift Retailing Market
3. Technavio — Gifts Retailing Market 2026–2030
4. For Insights Consultancy — Gifting Market Forecast to 2030
5. The Business Research Company — Corporate Gifting Global Market Report
6. Coresight Research x GiftNow — The $258 Billion US Corporate Gifting Opportunity
7. Coresight Research / GiftNow — US corporate gifting growth (PR Newswire)
8. ASI survey via Business News Daily — employee and client gift budgets
9. Precedence Research — Gift Cards Market 2026–2035
10. Capital One Shopping — Gift Card Statistics
11. NRF — Holiday Sales to Surpass $1 Trillion in 2025
12. NRF — Winter Holiday Data and Trends
13. NRF — Gift Cards in the 2025 Holiday Season
14. NRF — Valentine’s Day 2026 Record Spending
15. NRF — Mother’s Day 2026 Record $38 Billion
16. NRF via Mass Market Retailers — Father’s Day 2026 Spending
17. PwC UK — Festive Spending Forecast £24.6bn
18. Deloitte — 2025 Holiday Retail Survey
19. Market Research Future — Personalized Gifts Market to 2027
20. SkyQuest — Personalized Gifts Market to 2033
21. Research and Markets — US Personalized Gifting Market
22. Technavio — Gift Card Market Growth 2022–2027
23. Arizton — US Floral Gifting Market to 2027
24. GetYourGuide / Wakefield Research — 92% Prefer Experiential Gifts
25. NIQ — Holiday 2025 Shopping and Self-Gifting
26. MGH via Retail Dive — TikTok Gift Discovery Survey
27. EMarketer — TikTok Shop Share of Social Commerce
28. Checkout.com — The First AI Christmas
29. Center for Biological Diversity — Holiday Consumerism Survey
30. IRF / Gallup-Workhuman data via Blinkswag — Recognition and Retention Statistics
31. Snappy 2026 Workforce Study via Rewordin — Employee Gifting Preferences
32. NCH Stats — Wedding and Birthday Gift Spending (citing The Knot, LendingTree, Gallup)

Found a newer figure or a broken link? Contact us and we will update the page. We revise these statistics as new report years are published.