Someone drops a link in the team chat. "Chipping in for Priya's leaving present — link's here, closes Friday." You click it, and there's a box waiting for a number.
And you have no idea what to type.
This is the single most common moment of low-grade stress in office life, and almost nobody talks about it. You're not worried about the money. You're worried about being the person who put in £3 when everyone else put in £15, or the person who put in £30 and made everyone else look tight. There's no price list. There's no norm you can see. There's just a box, a cursor, and about nine seconds before it starts to feel weird.
This guide is the answer to that. What to put in, what should actually move the number, and what you can safely ignore.
First, what a collection pot actually is
A collection pot is the money side of a group gift. Someone — usually a manager, usually the person who volunteers for everything — opens a shared pot online, sends the link round, and everyone who wants to chip in does. When it closes, the total goes to the person it was for.
It's the digital version of the brown envelope that used to go round the office, minus the counting, the chasing, and the problem of the envelope only ever reaching the people who happened to be at their desk that day. The term gets used interchangeably with "office collection", "whip-round", "the kitty" and "group gift" depending on where in the country you work. Same thing.
If you're the one organising rather than contributing, our guide to collecting money for a group gift is the one you want. This post is for everyone else — the fifteen people staring at the box.
The short answer
If you want a number and you want to stop reading, here it is.
Occasion | Typical range | Comfortable default |
|---|---|---|
Birthday, someone you work with | £5–£10 | £5 |
Leaving, a colleague you knew a bit | £10–£15 | £10 |
Leaving, someone on your immediate team | £15–£25 | £20 |
New baby | £10–£20 | £10 |
Wedding or engagement | £15–£25 | £20 |
Retirement, long service | £20–£30 | £20 |
Thank you / get well / bereavement | £5–£15 | £10 |
The most widely cited UK figure puts the average individual contribution at around £12.89 and the average workplace pot at about £138.65. That research was published by Collection Pot a few years ago now, so treat it as directional rather than current — but it matches what we see, and it's a useful sanity check. If you're somewhere between a fiver and twenty quid, you are entirely normal and nobody is going to think about it for even one second.
That's genuinely the whole answer. The rest of this post is for the part of your brain that doesn't believe it.
Why the number feels so much harder than it is
Three things make this decision disproportionately uncomfortable, and it helps to name them.
There's no visible norm. On a well-built collection pot, you can't see what anyone else gave. That's deliberate and it's the right call — visible amounts turn a gift into a leaderboard, and the person who can only spare £5 shouldn't have to publish that next to a director's £50. But the side effect is that you're pricing something with no reference point, which is exactly the condition under which humans get anxious and overthink.
The cost of getting it wrong feels asymmetric. Under-give and you're stingy. Over-give and you're showing off, or worse, you've quietly raised the bar for everyone who contributes after you. Both feel like social risks. Neither is, but the feeling is real, and it's why 65% of people in that same research said they worry about contributing the right amount.
You're spending money on someone else's behalf, under time pressure, in public-ish. That combination is unusual. Most spending decisions are private and self-interested. This one is neither.
None of these are reasons to give more. They're just reasons the decision feels heavier than the amount involved. Once you can see the mechanism, it loses most of its grip.
What should actually move your number
Four things, in rough order of how much weight to give them.
1. How close you actually are. Not how close you're supposed to be. If you sat next to Priya for three years and she covered for you the week your boiler exploded, that's a £20 contribution. If Priya is someone you've said good morning to in the kitchen twice, that's a fiver, and a fiver is a genuinely nice thing to do for someone you barely know.
2. The weight of the occasion. A leaving do after eight years is not a birthday. A retirement is not a leaving do. The bigger and more once-in-a-lifetime the moment, the higher the range shifts — which is why retirement pots run to more than £200 on average while birthdays sit near the bottom.
3. How many people are chipping in. This one runs opposite to intuition. In a team of six, your contribution is a meaningful slice of the total and it's worth going a bit higher. In an all-company collection with eighty contributors, £5 from everyone is already a £400 gift. Small team, lean up. Big team, the average is fine.
4. What you can actually afford this month. Last on the list but it overrides everything above it. There is no version of workplace generosity that should involve you going short. If money is tight, £5 with a warm message is a completely respectable contribution, and the person receiving it will never know or care what the number was.
What should not move your number
What you think other people are giving. You don't know, you can't find out, and guessing upward is how collections turn into an arms race.
Seniority — yours or theirs. Contributing more because you're senior is a decent instinct if you're comfortable with it, but it isn't an obligation, and nobody is auditing the payroll against the pot. Contributing more because the recipient is senior is a worse instinct. The person leaving the mailroom deserves the same collection as the person leaving the board.
The suggested amount, if there is one. Some platforms let organisers set a suggested contribution. It's a starting point, not an invoice. Good organisers deliberately leave it off precisely because any number anchors the whole team to it.
Guilt about the last one you missed. Collections are participation-based. You are allowed to skip one, or several. There's no ledger.
A tip prompt. If the platform asks you to add a "tip" or "support the platform" amount on top of your contribution, that's a fee wearing a costume, and you should feel completely free to set it to zero. We've written about why that pattern needs to go.
The awkward cases
You genuinely can't afford it. Contribute nothing and sign the card, or contribute £2 and write something lovely. The message is the part the recipient actually keeps. On any decent platform you can leave a note without leaving money, and nobody sees a list of who gave what.
You don't like the person. Then don't contribute. Silently. A collection isn't a loyalty test and there's no register. Skipping it is invisible; making a point of skipping it is not.
You've just joined. Give the low end of the range or nothing at all, with zero guilt. New starters are the last people who should feel obliged to fund a leaving gift for someone they've met twice.
You're being asked in person, with the organiser standing there. This is the one genuinely bad version, and it's why link-based pots exist. If it happens, "let me send it over this afternoon" is a complete sentence.
It's for your manager. Nothing changes. Same range, same logic. If anything, resist the pull upward — collections for the boss are where the arms-race dynamic does the most damage.
Where the money actually goes
Worth knowing, since you're handing over a card number to a link someone pasted in a chat.
On a properly run platform, contributions sit in a safeguarded account — ringfenced from the company's own money — until the pot closes. That matters: if the platform went under between you contributing and the pot being paid out, safeguarded funds aren't part of the wreckage. It's worth thirty seconds to check the platform is either an FCA-authorised Electronic Money Institution or operating as the agent of one.
The other thing worth checking is what the recipient can actually do with the money, because platforms differ sharply here and it's rarely on the homepage. On some, a pot can only ever become a gift card from a fixed list of retailers — fine if that list happens to include somewhere they'd have shopped anyway, quietly disappointing if it doesn't. On others, the choice belongs to the person receiving it.
That's the part we felt strongest about when we built Hey Friday: the pot goes to the recipient, and what it becomes is up to them. If that's a gift card for somewhere they actually like, lovely. If they'd rather have the money and put it towards a boiler instead of a hamper, that's their business and not ours to steer. Our fee is 1.9% + 20p per contribution, disclosed before you pay, and there's no tip prompt on top of it.
Practical questions
Is my contribution anonymous? Depends on the platform, but on most you can choose. Hey Friday lets you contribute anonymously and still leave a message — generosity doesn't need a byline.
Can the recipient see how much I gave? On a well-designed pot, no. They see the total and they see every message. Individual amounts stay private.
Do I have to create an account? You shouldn't have to. If a platform makes you sign up to give £10 to a colleague, that's a design decision made for the platform's benefit, not yours.
What if I contribute and then the collection doesn't hit its target? The gift still happens, it's just smaller. Targets are a motivational device, not a condition.
Can I get a refund if I change my mind? Usually yes, before the pot closes. After it's closed the money has moved on, so it gets harder. Ask the organiser early rather than late.
Should I add a message or just the money? The message. Always the message. Ask anyone who's ever received one of these what they still have six months later and it is never the amount.
How much do I put in if I'm the organiser? Whatever you'd have put in anyway. Organising is already the contribution nobody thanks you for.
Is a work collection taxable for the recipient? Contributions from colleagues personally are a gift between individuals, not earnings, so this doesn't normally arise. It's different when the employer funds the gift — that's where HMRC's trivial benefits rules come in, which we cover in our guide to gift cards for UK employees.
The rule that covers 95% of cases
Give a tenner. Write something specific and true in the message. Move on with your day.
If you were closer to them than average, make it twenty. If money's tight this month, make it five, or nothing, and write the message anyway. That's the entire decision, and you've now spent longer reading about it than it deserves — which was rather the point.
The number is the least memorable part of a collection. Nobody has ever re-read a total. People re-read the messages for years.
Organising one rather than contributing to it? Start a Hey Friday collection — set it up in about three minutes, share one link, and the whole pot reaches them with every message attached, to spend however they like.