The question of the right leaving gift contribution amount is one that trips up workers across the country: too little feels awkward, too much feels like pressure nobody asked for. Workers in London have been sharing what they would put in, and a broader picture of UK workplace gifting habits helps put those views in context.
What the Numbers Say About Leaving Gift Contribution Amounts
According to Feel Good Times, the going rate for a colleague on your immediate team is £5 to £10. If you rarely crossed paths with the person leaving, somewhere between £2 and £5 is considered reasonable. For someone you worked closely with day to day, the suggested range rises to £10 to £20. These figures give a practical starting point, though plenty of workplaces have their own unspoken norms that bear little resemblance to any guide.
Zoom out to what gets spent in total and the sums climb quickly. Huggg found that most UK teams spend between £20 and £50 per leaver once a collection has done the rounds. That range will feel modest in some offices and eye-wateringly high in others, depending on team size and how long the colleague has been around.
Gift Vouchers Dominate, But the Admin Is Often Still Done by Hand
When it comes to what actually gets bought, gift vouchers are the default choice for 43.5% of UK organisations, according to the Cutter & Squidge 2026 corporate gifting report. They are easy to organise and sidestep the guesswork of choosing something personal for someone whose tastes you may not know well.
What makes that statistic more interesting is the backdrop against which those vouchers are being bought. The same Cutter & Squidge report found that over 55% of UK organisations still manage their gifting entirely by hand, with no dedicated platform or automation in place. That means the familiar scenario of a paper envelope being passed around the office, or a group chat collecting bank transfer details, is not a relic of a pre-digital age. It remains the normal way of doing things for more than half of British workplaces.
The practical effect is that one person usually ends up coordinating the whole thing: chasing contributions, keeping track of who has paid, and working out what the pot will stretch to. That role tends to fall to whoever sits nearest the door or speaks up first, and it is largely thankless work.
The Unspoken Pressure of the Collection
Leaving collections carry a social weight that the bare numbers cannot fully capture. Contributing too little risks being noticed; contributing more than you can comfortably afford is a form of social tax nobody puts in the employment contract. The tiered guidance from Feel Good Times (ranging from a couple of pounds for a near-stranger to £20 for a close colleague) at least gives people a defensible reference point when the envelope arrives.
Team size matters too. A five-person team can pool £50 without anyone spending more than a tenner. A sprawling department where not everyone knows the leaver personally makes the maths murkier, and the pressure to give something proportionate to everyone else’s contribution is harder to calibrate.
For workplaces still running collections on a handshake and a group chat, the Cutter & Squidge finding that more than half of UK organisations have no system in place suggests the experience is unlikely to change any time soon. The envelope, it seems, is here to stay.
