The $10 rule for a gift to your boss

By Eric, KindHow founder · Last reviewed August 2026

The short answer

Federal ethics regulations bar an employee from giving, or contributing toward, a gift for their own official superior — with a narrow list of exceptions. sourced The one that covers an ordinary office collection caps it at items other than cash worth $10 or less per occasion. That figure is per person, not per gift, and a bigger group does not raise it — it only means more people are each capped at the same $10.

The rule, in its own words

5 CFR 2635.302 states the general prohibition plainly, and it covers both giving and asking: sourced

“[An employee may not,] directly or indirectly, give a gift to or make a contribution toward a gift for an official superior.”

“[An employee may not] solicit a contribution from another employee for a gift to either their own or the other employee’s official superior.”

5 CFR 2635.304 then carves out the exception a normal office collection actually relies on:

“Items, other than cash, with an aggregate market value of $10 or less per occasion.”

A separate, more generous exception exists for genuinely infrequent personal milestones — a marriage, a serious illness, a retirement — where “a gift appropriate to the occasion” is allowed without the same $10 cap. sourcedThat exception does not reach an ordinary birthday, a holiday, or “just because” — the everyday occasions a routine office collection is usually raised for.

Why a group collection breaks it so fast

$10 sounds workable for one person picking out a card. It stops working the moment a group pools money for one present, because the cap applies to what the supervisor receives, not to what any one giver contributes. A $250 gift split ten ways is $25 a head to the givers — and $250 received by the supervisor, 25 times the exception’s ceiling. house judgment— the $10 figure is the regulation’s; applying it to a specific pooled example is our arithmetic, not the CFR’s own worked case.

The regulation does leave room for a group to give something bigger than $10 without breaking the rule: voluntary, nominal contributions toward a gift can be solicited for one of the exception occasions above — a genuine, infrequent milestone — rather than for routine recurring ones. sourcedA supervisor’s retirement clears that bar. Their birthday, most years, does not.

What this doesn’t mean

• It doesn’t apply outside federal employment.This is a government-wide ethics standard for federal employees and their official superiors — a private employer’s office culture isn’t bound by 5 CFR 2635 at all.
• It doesn’t mean $10 is the most a federal office can ever spend on a supervisor.The special-occasion exception exists precisely for the milestones ordinary life produces — it just doesn’t cover a routine annual gift.
• It doesn’t mean cash items are simply capped differently. The $10 exception is explicitly for items other than cash— the regulation doesn’t offer a parallel cash allowance to fall back on.
• Agency rules can be stricter.5 CFR 2635 is the government-wide floor; individual agencies can and do supplement it. This guide reports the government-wide standard, not any one agency’s.

Sources

• 5 CFR 2635.304 — Gifts to superiors — the $10-or-less ordinary-occasion exception and the special-occasion exception quoted above.
• 5 CFR 2635.302 — General prohibitions — the ban on giving or soliciting a gift for an official superior that the exceptions above are carved out of.

Informational only. This guide reports 5 CFR 2635.302 and 2635.304 as published and labels our own reasoning as ours. It is not legal advice — agency supplemental regulations and any state or local rules are out of scope. Last reviewed: August 2026.

More on how KindHow separates a source from a house call: the published methodology. Every guide is listed on the guides index.