How Much to Spend on a Corporate Gift, By Relationship

Corporate gifting budgets cluster into three tiers. Bulk employee gifts — the kind ordered by the hundred — typically run ₹500–1,000 per person. Standard client or vendor gifts sit at ₹1,500–3,000. Premium client, partner, or senior-leadership gifts move into ₹5,000–8,000, with select relationships going well beyond that. Client-facing budgets are frequently capped by internal compliance policy — most caps sit between ₹2,000 and ₹5,000 regardless of how senior the relationship is, so it's worth checking your own company's policy before committing to something premium. One direction is universal: gifts flow downward or sideways, never up. Gifting a boss or senior leader — even with good intentions — reads as awkward at best and transactional at worst. If a team wants to mark the occasion for a senior person, a small card or gesture works better than a pooled gift. Cash and vouchers consistently beat physical gifts in what recipients actually say they want, particularly for junior and support staff — drivers, guards, junior office staff — where cash is almost always preferred over a wrapped gift. Physical gifts do better higher up the relationship, where the gesture carries more weight than the value. A gift that's your own company's product is one of the most reliably disliked choices in corporate gifting — recipients read it as marketing rather than a gift, however good the product actually is. There's also a real tax number worth knowing: gifts from an employer to an employee are tax-free as a perquisite under Section 17(2)(viii) of the Income Tax Act, up to a threshold — long capped at ₹5,000 a year in aggregate, raised to ₹15,000 from FY2026-27 onward. Cross that line and the entire value becomes taxable, not just the excess, so it's worth checking where a gifting budget actually lands before finalizing bulk orders.