Somewhere in early December, almost everyone asks the same question and gets the same unhelpful answer: how much should I spend on this? Whatever feels right.
Most people setting a Christmas budget aren't working from a real number. They guess, adjust as the season goes, and feel a little off about the total once the January card statement shows up. There's actual data on what people spend, broken down by who they're buying for, and there's real research on whether spending more even helps.
What's in this article
Key takeaways
- Two separate 2025 surveys landed on almost the same figure: about $628 spent on gifts for family and friends per person.
- Only 24% of holiday shoppers actually set a budget before shopping, which is a lot of why spending tends to drift upward.
- Research on gift-giving consistently finds that price doesn't reliably read as thoughtfulness to the person receiving the gift.
- A simple per-person allocation, decided before you start browsing, does more to control both spending and gift quality than shopping first and totaling up later.
What Americans actually spend on Christmas gifts
The National Retail Federation runs the longest-running annual survey on this, now in its 23rd year. For 2025, it found Americans planned to spend $890.49 per person across the whole winter holiday season: gifts, food, decorations, cards, all of it combined.
Of that total, $627.93 was specifically for gifts to family and friends. The rest went to food, decorations, and other seasonal spending that has nothing to do with what's under the tree.
A separate survey from Bankrate, run independently of NRF, found consumers budgeted roughly $628 for gifts alone, essentially the same number NRF arrived at from a completely different sample. When two unrelated surveys land on nearly identical figures, that convergence is stronger evidence than either survey alone.
The more telling number is buried in the same Bankrate report: only 24% of holiday shoppers said they set a budget before they started buying. The other three out of four are spending without a number in mind, which is a large part of why the final total tends to feel like a surprise every year.
A budget guide by relationship
National averages are a starting point, not a rule. What you actually spend should scale with the relationship, and there's a fairly consistent pattern across etiquette guides and surveys for how people tend to split a holiday budget by who they're buying for.
| Relationship | Typical range | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Spouse / partner | $75–$200+ | Usually the largest single gift on the list, scaled to your combined household budget |
| Your kids | $50–$200 per child | Varies enormously by family norm and number of kids; consistency between siblings matters more than the exact number |
| Parents / in-laws | $40–$75 | A step down from immediate household, but usually more than siblings or friends |
| Siblings / extended family | $25–$50 | Often standardized across a family via a set limit or a Secret Santa-style draw |
| Close friends | $20–$40 | Meaningful without creating an expectation of reciprocation at the same level |
| Coworkers | $15–$25 | Workplace gifting norms favor modest, non-intimate items; Secret Santa exchanges usually set their own cap |
| Teachers / service providers | $15–$30 or a small gift card | A token of appreciation, not proportional to a personal relationship |
A couple of patterns are worth noting. Workplace gifting tends to flow downward more than up: a manager buying for their team is more common than the reverse. For coworkers specifically, staying modest and clearly work-appropriate matters more than the exact dollar figure. Anything that reads as unusually personal, like perfume or clothing, tends to land oddly no matter the price.
If your group already runs a Secret Santa or White Elephant exchange, that set limit overrides everything in this table. The whole point of those formats is that everyone spends the same amount.
Does spending more make a gift more thoughtful?
This is worth answering directly, because it's the assumption sitting underneath most budget anxiety: the fear that spending less means the gift will feel less thoughtful.
The research says that fear isn't well-founded.
Reviewing gift-giving research broadly, the authors found givers and recipients are often optimizing for different things. Givers tend to associate a higher price with more effort and more thoughtfulness. Recipients don't reliably make that connection; what reads as thoughtful to them is relevance, not the number on the receipt.
Across five separate studies, gifts recipients had explicitly requested were rated as more thoughtful and more personal than surprise gifts, regardless of price. Givers consistently assumed an unsolicited, surprising gift would be rated as more thoughtful. Recipients rated it lower. Specificity mattered more than either surprise or price.
None of this means price is irrelevant. A gift that's obviously too cheap for the occasion can read as an oversight. But past a baseline that fits the relationship, more money buys diminishing returns on how thoughtful a gift actually feels to the person opening it. A well-matched $30 gift reliably outperforms a poorly matched $80 one. We covered this research in more depth in why generic gift lists don't work.
How to set your own number, before you start shopping
The single biggest lever here isn't the size of your total budget. It's whether you set one at all before you start buying.
A simple version of this that works for most people:
- Set one total number for the whole season first, not per person. Decide the whole list's gift total before any shopping happens.
- List everyone you're buying for, then allocate by relationship tier. Use the table above as a starting range, adjusted to your own total.
- Leave a small buffer, not zero. Someone always gets added to the list late, and 10-15% slack keeps that from blowing the whole budget.
- Decide the number before you start browsing, not while you're browsing. Once you're looking at specific products, it's much harder to hold a number in your head than it is on a list written down beforehand.
Knowing what to buy within the budget is usually the harder, more time-consuming part. Our free AI gift finder takes a budget range as one of its inputs directly, so you can set the ceiling first and get ideas that already fit inside it.
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Try the AI Gift Finder →Frequently asked questions
What's the average amount people spend on Christmas gifts?
Two independent surveys landed on almost the same number for 2025: the National Retail Federation found Americans spent $627.93 on gifts for family and friends, and Bankrate found consumers budgeted around $628 for gifts alone.
That's total spending across everyone on a person's list, not per gift.
How much should I spend on a coworker's Christmas gift?
$15 to $25 is the commonly cited range for coworkers, and less for a Secret Santa or White Elephant exchange, which usually has its own set limit.
Workplace gifting also tends to flow downward, from manager to employee, more often than the other way around.
Does spending more money make a Christmas gift feel more thoughtful?
Research says no. Studies on gift-giving find that givers assume a higher price signals more effort, but recipients don't reliably make that connection.
Specific, relevant gifts read as more thoughtful than expensive ones, regardless of price.
Why don't most people set a Christmas gift budget?
Bankrate's 2025 survey found only 24% of holiday shoppers actually set a budget before shopping.
Without one, spending tends to drift upward gift by gift, since each individual purchase feels small in the moment even as the total adds up.
Sources & further reading
- National Retail Federation. "Consumers to Spend Second-Highest Amount on Record, According to NRF Holiday Survey." 2025 Winter Holiday Consumer Survey, conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics.
- Bankrate. "2025 Holiday Spending Report."
- Galak, J., Givi, J., & Williams, E. F. (2016). "Why Certain Gifts Are Great to Give but Not to Get." Current Directions in Psychological Science.
- Gino, F., & Flynn, F. J. (2011). "Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
How we researched this guide
The spending figures above come from two independently conducted 2025 surveys, NRF and Bankrate, rather than a single source. Their convergence on the same number is the actual evidence; either figure alone would be weaker.
The relationship-tier budget ranges reflect a pattern consistent across multiple etiquette and personal-finance sources rather than one blog's opinion; treat them as a starting range, not a rule, since household norms vary. The psychology research is cited by author, journal, and year, and we read the original findings rather than a secondhand summary.
No brand paid to be mentioned in this article.