How much should everyone chip in for a group gift?

The short version

Collect first, choose the gift second. Ask what people want to put in, add it up, then buy something that costs that. Never name a per-head figure against a gift you have already picked.

Reversing those two steps is the entire problem. It converts every person who pays less, pays late or never replies into a debt owed by one person, and that person is always the one who volunteered.

Why it is always the organizer

Not because the group is mean. The two people who sent $25 sent what they had, and the one who never replied has a hundred unread messages and no idea this is happening. Every individual behavior here is ordinary.

By the time the shortfall is visible the gift is bought, the card is signed and the party is tomorrow. Nobody else even knows there is a number missing. So it gets absorbed, silently, and the same person volunteers again next time because nobody ever found out it cost them.

• A per-head figure is a ceiling, not a floor. People pay it or less. Almost nobody pays more, because the number told them what enough looks like.
• Silence reads as a no that never gets counted. One unread message is $46.67 that the arithmetic already spent.
• The deadline is the gift, not the money. You cannot wait for the last payment, so you cover it and intend to chase. Nobody chases.

The same gift, organized both ways

Nine people, the same nine replies. The only thing that changes is whether the present was chosen before or after the money was counted.

The second row is not a worse present. It is a $330 present instead of a $420 one, chosen once somebody knew what the group had, and the person who did the organizing went home even. Nobody in the group experiences those two rows differently: the same people paid the same amounts and signed the same card.

Check your own exposure before you buy

Put in the gift, the headcount, and an honest guess at how many will pay in full. The default is the example above. The number to look at is what you are covering, not what you are asking.

Asking when people can afford very different amounts

One number excludes somebody. Set it at $50 and the person having a hard month either overpays or has to explain themselves in a group chat, and most people will pick a third option, which is not replying.

Offer named amounts instead. Three tiers of $60, $45 and $25, taken up by two, four and three people, raises $375. More than the single ask collected, and nobody had to say no to a figure.

• Collect privately, always. The whole value of a tier is that it lets somebody give the smallest one without announcing it.
• Never circulate the amounts. A list of who gave what turns a gift into a ranking.
• Put a date on it. “By Thursday” collects more than “whenever”, because a request with no deadline is a request with no moment at which it is done.

This is the same shape as the wider question of which method a shared cost wants: how to split shared costs fairly compares the five and says how much the choice is worth before you spend an evening on it.

If you have already bought it and the money has not come in

Ask once, with the figure and a date, and then stop. It is a favor you chose to do rather than a debt anybody agreed to, and pursuing it as a debt costs more than $89.98 is worth.

The exception is a genuinely large sum, or a group where this is the third time. When someone doesn’t pay you back covers getting to an exact figure and the message that actually gets it sent. And if this was a trip rather than a present, the same dynamic has its own page: when one person pays for everything on a group trip prices the float the payer is carrying, which is usually far bigger than anybody realizes.

Common questions

Every figure here was produced by running Halvy’s own split engine on the worked example, and the contributions reconcile to $330.02 exactly rather than to within a cent or two. The pattern of replies is a plausible one rather than a measurement of any particular group.