The legal floor on a gift card's expiry¶
Gift card expiry is regulated in several of the markets OpenCart stores sell into, and the rules disagree with each other. This page is the table Gift Cards shows you on its own settings screen, so that what you are warned about and what is published here are one thing rather than two.
It warns, and it refuses nothing¶
Gift Cards will save any validity period you type. Below 60 months — the highest floor in the table — the settings screen shows a warning beneath the field, and that is the whole of what happens. Nothing is blocked, no value is rounded up and no card is treated differently.
That is deliberate. There is no EU-wide minimum validity period; the floor is national and runs from no statute at all to Ireland's five years. A merchant in a country with no rule may legitimately want two years, and a field that refused them would be this extension asserting a rule it cannot stand behind in a country it does not know they are in.
What we checked¶
| Where | The floor | The rule, and what happens below it |
|---|---|---|
| Ireland | At least 5 years, or no expiry date at all | Consumer Protection Act 2007 s. 66B(1), inserted by the Consumer Protection (Gift Vouchers) Act 2019. Selling a card with a shorter expiry is a criminal offence, and the contract is deemed to carry five years regardless — so a storefront enforcing a shorter one is refusing redemptions it is obliged to honour. The expiry must also be stated on the card or on a durable medium supplied with it. |
| United States (federal) | The funds must last at least 5 years | Regulation E, 12 CFR § 1005.20(e). The floor is on the money rather than on the printed date: a shorter card is permitted only where the balance survives five years and the holder can get a replacement free of charge. The expiry terms must be disclosed before purchase and carried on the card itself. |
| California | No expiry date at all | Civil Code § 1749.5(a)(1). Selling a gift certificate carrying an expiry date is unlawful there, whatever the period — no positive number in this field clears it. Setting one is also what pulls an unspent balance into escheat to the state under CCP § 1520.5, so an expiry does not mean the merchant keeps the money. Other US states legislate separately and were not checked. |
| Germany | No statutory minimum; 3 years in practice | § 195 BGB gives a three-year limitation period and § 307 BGB voids a standard term that unreasonably disadvantages the consumer. Reported case law treats 12 months or less as inadmissible, and a term struck down is replaced by the three years rather than removed. § 199 BGB runs that period from the end of the year the card was sold, so it reaches further than three years from the sale. |
| Netherlands | No statutory minimum | Art. 3:307(1) BW prescribes a contractual claim five years after it falls due, and unfair-terms control runs through arts. 6:236 and 6:237 BW. No Dutch statute sets a minimum validity period; the widely repeated two-year figure has no statutory basis behind it that could be found, so it is not relied on here in either direction. |
| United Kingdom | No statutory minimum | Consumer Rights Act 2015 s. 62: an unfair term does not bind the consumer, and s. 64(2) exempts a term from that assessment only where it is transparent and prominent. An unreasonably short period is struck down after the fact rather than refused up front, which is a weaker and less predictable thing to design against than a number in a statute. |
Not a complete list, and not legal advice
This list is not exhaustive and none of it is legal advice. It covers only the jurisdictions checked against a primary source; several EU countries were not checked at all, so a country missing from this table is one there is no answer for here rather than one with no rule. Gift card expiry is regulated where you sell, not where your store is hosted. Check your own market, and take advice before setting a period.
Every row above was read off a primary source, and the research behind the table also records what could not be verified. Those notes are kept with the extension's source and are not part of the package or of this site, so if a row looks wrong for your market, tell us and we will check it against them.
Two things that bite harder than the minimum period¶
The buyer has to be told before they pay. An expiry the buyer was never told about is in practice unenforceable — by an express disclosure duty in Ireland and the United States, and by the misleading-omission and unfair-terms rules elsewhere in the EU. Gift Cards states the period on OpenCart's own gift card purchase form, above the fields, whenever you have set one. With the period unset it states nothing, because there is nothing to state.
A period you change later never reaches a card already sold. The period is read once per card, when that card's order first reaches a complete status, and what is written onto the card is the date it produced. Changing the number afterwards moves no card that already has an answer. Altering the expiry of a voucher already sold is separately unlawful in the United States and a textbook unfair term in the EU and the UK, and this is why it cannot happen here rather than merely not being offered.