Documents · Glossary

Gift voucher expiry rules, and what the voucher has to show

In Australia most gift cards and vouchers sold to consumers must be valid for at least three years from the day they are supplied, and the expiry date or the period of validity has to be shown on the card itself. Post supply fees are generally banned. A small number of voucher types sit outside the rule.

The three year rule has been national law since late 2019, and it changed the economics of gift cards for small retailers who used to rely on unredeemed balances. Getting the printing right is now part of getting the compliance right.

Nuwan Madhusanka · Co-founder

5 min read · Published 12 September 2026

Expiry rules in three markets
	Australia	United Kingdom	United States
Minimum validity	At least 3 years from supply	No general statutory minimum	Federal law sets 5 years for many gift certificates, with state laws often stricter
Must the date be shown	Yes, the expiry date or the period of validity	Terms must be clear and fair	Disclosure requirements apply
Post supply fees	Generally banned	Dormancy fees have been common, subject to fairness rules	Restricted, with conditions on inactivity fees
Who enforces	The ACCC and state consumer agencies	Consumer protection and contract terms rules	Federal and state regulators
Common exclusions	Some promotional, loyalty and second hand market cards	Varies by scheme	Varies by state

What the three year rule actually covers

The rule applies to gift cards and vouchers supplied to consumers on or after the start date of the national scheme, and it sets a floor rather than a ceiling, so a business is free to sell a voucher with no expiry at all. The period runs from supply, which is the day the card is sold or given to the customer, not the day it is activated or first used. There are carve outs. Cards supplied as part of a customer loyalty or employee reward programme, cards for a specific good or service available for a limited period, cards sold below face value in a genuine promotion, and cards resold by someone other than the business are treated differently. If a business is unsure which side of the line a particular voucher falls on, the safe course is to give three years, because the cost of being generous is far lower than the cost of being wrong.

Printing the date and the terms

Showing the expiry is a separate obligation from honouring it. The card has to display either the date it expires or the period of validity, such as valid for three years from the date of purchase, and that has to be legible on the card rather than only in an email. For a paper voucher that means the date is part of the artwork or a printed field, and for a digital one it means the date is on the face of the file the customer receives. Terms that matter to a recipient belong on the voucher too: whether it can be part redeemed, whether change is given, whether it applies to sale items, and the phone number or email to use if it is lost. Anything a recipient would be annoyed to discover at the counter should be visible before they get there.

Fees, change and part redemption

Post supply fees on gift cards are generally banned in Australia, which covers activation, account keeping and balance enquiry charges applied after the card was bought. Businesses can still charge for things like a replacement physical card in defined circumstances, but the general position is that the value on the card should stay intact. Part redemption is where customer complaints cluster. If a sixty dollar voucher is used for a forty dollar purchase, the customer expects the remaining twenty to be available, and a policy that voids the balance will be read as sharp practice even where it is disclosed. Decide the position, write it on the voucher, and make sure the point of sale system can actually do what the voucher says.

What happens when the business closes

This is the question the rules do not solve. An unredeemed voucher is an unsecured claim on the business, and in an insolvency the holder generally ranks behind secured creditors and employees, which usually means little or nothing. For a small business the practical implications are worth understanding in advance: money taken for vouchers is not revenue in an economic sense until it is redeemed, and treating it as working capital is how a bad quarter turns into a queue of unhappy voucher holders. Keeping voucher liabilities visible in the accounts, with the expiry dates attached, also makes the three year obligation easy to manage rather than a surprise.

Building the voucher as a document

A voucher is a one page presentation piece with a record on the back, so it takes a plain layout and no cover. A cover is never added to a document under three pages or to anything that functions as a receipt or certificate. A key values block carries the amount, the voucher number, the supply date and the expiry in four fields, and the four key values layouts cover the usual arrangements. The ten theme presets give the front enough personality without custom design work. There are no input fields in documents, so the voucher number and dates are written as content for each voucher.

Questions people ask

Can a voucher have no expiry date at all?

Yes. Three years is a minimum, not a requirement to expire. Some businesses sell vouchers with no expiry as a selling point and treat the outstanding balance as a long term liability. The trade off is an accounting one rather than a legal one, and it needs a way to verify very old vouchers years later.

What if a customer turns up with an expired voucher?

There is no obligation to honour it once a compliant expiry has passed, but plenty of businesses do as a matter of goodwill, particularly where the gap is small. Decide the policy in advance and apply it consistently, because ad hoc decisions at the counter become the thing customers compare in reviews.

Do the rules cover vouchers given away for free?

Promotional vouchers handed out as part of a marketing campaign are generally treated differently from cards a consumer has paid for, and several carve outs address them. That does not mean the terms can be misleading. A voucher advertised as worth fifty dollars with conditions that make it nearly unusable is a consumer law problem regardless of the expiry rules.

Does the rule apply to business to business vouchers?

The scheme is aimed at gift cards supplied to consumers. Arrangements between businesses, such as prepaid service credits negotiated in a contract, are governed by that contract instead. Where a business buys cards in bulk to give to staff or customers, the cards themselves are still consumer facing when they reach the recipient.

Can the terms be changed after the voucher is sold?

Changing the deal after somebody has paid is risky, and unilateral variation of consumer terms attracts attention under the unfair contract terms regime. If a business is changing what a voucher can be used for, honouring existing vouchers on the original terms until they expire is both the safe course and the cheap one.

What records should a business keep?

At minimum the voucher number, the date of supply, the amount, the expiry date, and whether and when it was redeemed. That is what lets a business verify a voucher presented two years later, account for the outstanding liability, and answer a dispute. A numbering sequence matters more than the format the records are kept in.

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Sources

Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked 12 September 2026.