Group gift share calculator

Methodology

This tool runs the Kindhow Scale, version 1.0, and it is the first one on the site whose subject has a right answer. Splitting is arithmetic. What is not arithmetic is the weight each person carries into it, and that is the only part of this page where we have an opinion.

The formula

weight each person by what they'd give on their own:

  the published figure    The Knot / U.S. News, by how close they are
                          office collections: our 20 / 15 / 10 ladder   judgment

  the target              the present's price
                          + the card and the shipping, if you're splitting those
                          (no price yet → the weights added up, which is
                           what the group would have given individually)

  one person's share      = their weight ÷ every weight × the target

  then any ceiling:
    somebody's own limit  → pin them there, spread the rest over everybody else
    a published rule      → pin everybody there
                            5 CFR 2635.304(a): $10, non-cash, per person   sourced
    re-run until nothing new binds

  round every share the model moved  (lib/giveable.js)
  leave every share it didn't at the figure its source published

  ─────────────
  = one line per rung of the group, one share each
  a line calls itself sourced only while its figure is still
  the one its source published

Why not divide by the number of people

Because an even split is only fair when everybody is equally close, and a group gift is almost never that group. It is the sister, two good friends and three people from work, and dividing by six asks the person who has met the bride twice to match the person who grew up with her.

So each rung is weighted by what somebody at that distance gives on their own — a figure The Knot and U.S. News already publish — and the present’s price scales all of them together.

Same present, same total, one fewer quiet resentment. The ratio between the rungs is the sourced part; the decision to use that ratio at all is ours.

Where the weights come from — sourced

Two of the three occasions borrow their ladder from the tool that owns it, rather than keeping a second copy that could drift: the wedding rungs are The Knot’s recommended figures by relationship, imported from the wedding gift calculator, and the shower rungs are U.S. News’ bands, imported from the baby shower gift calculator. Change a figure there and it changes here, in one edit.

The office ladder has no source because nobody publishes one. It is $20 / $15 / $10, and what it is really doing is fixing the ratio — 4 : 3 : 2 — because the total comes from the present’s price, not from us. Those lines are tagged house judgment at every setting.

When a share is still the published figure

Leave the price box empty and the target becomes the sum of the published figures — $900 for the group above. Every share is then exactly what its source recommends, and every line is tagged sourced. That is also a useful answer in its own right: it is what the group was collectively already prepared to spend.

Type in a real price and the shares scale. The moment they do, the figure on the line is no longer the one the source published, so the tag flips to house judgment and the line names the multiplier (0.7× here). Same computed-tag rule as the teacher gift calculator: a tag is a claim about the figure on that line, not a label on the tool.

One consequence worth stating plainly. An unscaled share is left at the published figure rather than rounded — The Knot’s $175 stays $175, because rounding it up to a tidier $180 would put a number on a sourced line that its source never said. Everything the model has actually moved is rounded to an amount somebody can hand over.

Somebody who cannot do it — judgment

“Most they can put in” pins a rung at what those people can manage and spreads the rest over everybody else. Pinning one rung can push another over its own ceiling, so the split re-runs until nothing new binds. In the example above, holding the three from work at $40 moves the good friends to $140 and the sibling to $200, and the present is still covered.

The number is theirs. Treating it as a hard ceiling rather than a target is our call, which is why those lines are tagged house judgment even though the figure came from the reader.

The federal ceiling — sourced

An office collection for the boss is the one group gift with a published limit, and almost nobody looks it up. 5 CFR 2635.302 prohibits a federal employee from giving a gift to an official superior at all, or soliciting a contribution from a colleague towards one. 5 CFR 2635.304 is what makes the office collection possible, and it draws a line the size of a sandwich:

• An ordinary occasion — a birthday, the holidays — allows “items, other than cash, with an aggregate market value of $10 or less per occasion.” Note both halves: cash is out entirely, and the $10 is per person. A group gift does not pool the allowance.
• A special, infrequent occasion — a retirement, a transfer, a marriage, a bereavement — allows “a gift appropriate to the occasion,” with no dollar figure attached. Contributions must still be of nominal amounts, and everyone asked must be told they are free to contribute less or nothing at all.

Set the tool to the ordinary-occasion rule and a $250 present from 10 colleagues does not become $25 a head — it becomes $10 a head, $100 collected, and $150 of present the group is not allowed to buy. The tool says that out loud rather than quietly producing a number that would put someone in front of their ethics officer. Where the regulation makes the cut, the line stays tagged sourced: the reduction is the citation.

Rounding, and the few dollars it leaves

Every scaled share is rounded to an amount somebody can actually hand over (lib/giveable.js), and nothing below $5 is asked of anyone — below that it stops reading as a contribution. Rounding six shares independently means they rarely land exactly on the price, so the ledger shows what they add up to and the plain sentence says which way it went: a few dollars over, or a few dollars for whoever is organising it to make up. Fudging the last rung to hide that would make one person’s share a plug figure, which is precisely the thing this tool exists to stop.

What this tool will not do

• It will not tell anybody what they owe. A group gift is an invitation, not an invoice. The right answer to “I can do $20” is “great, thank you” — and the tool has a box for it because that conversation goes better with a number in front of it.
• It does not know your agency’s rules. The federal figures are the government-wide standards. Individual agencies issue supplemental regulations that are sometimes stricter, and state, county and city employees have their own. This is not legal advice; your ethics office is two minutes away and will answer.
• It does not do class gifts for a teacher. The teacher gift calculator already does, including the Massachusetts cap of $150 across the whole school year. Two implementations of one answer is two numbers that can disagree.
• The office ladder is unsourced and stays that way until somebody publishes real figures for what colleagues put into a collection. If that lands, those lines get a source and a tag change in the same edit.
• It assumes one present. If half the group is also giving something individually, run those separately — the whole point of the weights is that they describe a person’s total giving, and counting them twice double-charges the closest people.

Sources

• The Knot — How Much to Spend on a Wedding Gift — the recommended per-relationship figures the wedding rungs are weighted by.
• U.S. News & World Report — How Much to Spend on a Baby Shower Gift, According to Experts — the bands the baby shower rungs are weighted by.
• 5 CFR 2635.304 — Exceptions (gifts between federal employees) — the $10 ordinary-occasion exception, the special-occasion exception, and the nominal-contributions condition on soliciting for a group gift.
• 5 CFR 2635.302 — General standards (gifts between federal employees) — the general prohibition the exceptions carve out of.

Informational only, not professional advice. The Kindhow Scale is a published model, not a standard, and the lines marked house judgment are our reasoning and nothing more. Nothing here is legal advice. Last reviewed: August 2026. Scale version 1.0. There are 4 rule settings on this tool; figures that come from a publication or a regulation are re-checked against their source on a monthly cycle, and when one moves the version number moves with it.