Five places household money goes and stops moving. Where a hard number exists, it is shown with its source. Where the industry has never measured well, this page says so instead of inventing a figure — and it deliberately never adds the categories into a single headline number, because they measure different things over different periods.
What Americans hold in unused gift cards and store credit — an average of $244 per person among the 43% who hold any.
The industry has a word for the portion that is never redeemed: breakage. It is an accounting line item — a retailer books it as revenue once a card is judged unlikely to be used. The card usually still works; the money is simply no longer expected back.
Source: Bankrate, 2024
Class packs and prepaid fitness packages routinely go unfinished.
A ten-pack of yoga classes at $300 with four sessions left is $120 already paid for. Punch cards fail differently from gift cards: there is no balance printed anywhere and usually no reminder before a pack expires, so the only record is a paper card in a drawer or a tally in someone else's system.
No reliable industry-wide figure exists, so we are not quoting one.
Programs the average consumer belongs to, versus programs they actively use.
The other eight are not worthless — they keep accruing value. They are simply invisible: no app open, no email read, no reason to think about them at the moment you are standing at the till.
Source: Bond Brand Loyalty, The Loyalty Report
Whether you used the perks or not.
Warehouse clubs pay cashback on a year of shopping. REI pays a yearly member reward. AAA and many gym memberships bundle perks that quietly expire, on a schedule that is rarely front and center. Nothing in your pocket surfaces them at the moment they matter — claiming them requires remembering they exist.
Source: each program's published terms
The balance that is too small to bother with and too large to throw away.
The awkward ones. A prepaid card with $6.42 left lives in a drawer forever — money already paid in, sitting still. Multiply by every Visa Gift, Mastercard Gift, and retailer prepaid card in every drawer, and the residue is real even though nobody has measured it well.
No reliable industry-wide figure exists, so we are not quoting one.
None of this is money you need to earn. It is money you already paid for, sitting somewhere you stopped looking.
Free for 3 cards. No account, no credit card.