How much to give

A cash gift is its own etiquette question

Tipping and gift-giving are different transactions, but they share the same underlying anxiety: "what's the right number, and will it look wrong if I get it off?" A wedding envelope, a graduation card, or a baby-shower gift each carries its own set of unwritten rules about amount, presentation, and timing — rules that vary by your relationship to the recipient, the formality of the event, and sometimes the region or cultural background of the family involved. This directory covers those occasions the same way the rest of the site covers tipping: honest ranges, not a single made-up number presented as fact.

Relationship changes the number more than the event does

For almost every occasion on this list, the biggest swing in an appropriate amount comes from how close you are to the person, not from the event category itself — a close family member's wedding generally calls for meaningfully more than a distant coworker's, even though it's nominally "the same" occasion. Each page here breaks its range down by relationship tier (immediate family, close friend, coworker or acquaintance) rather than giving one flat number that pretends those distinctions don't exist.

Cash, check, or gift card

Some occasions have a strong cultural preference for cash specifically (often tied to a tradition, like a red envelope or a wedding money dance), while others treat cash as slightly impersonal and favor a gift card or a contribution toward a registry item instead. Where that preference is real and specific to the occasion, the individual page says so — this index only orients you to which occasion you're looking for.

Milestone events vs. recurring ones

Some occasions on this list happen once in a relationship — a wedding, an engagement party, a quinceañera — and the gift is remembered as part of that single event. Others, like a teacher gift or a host gift, recur every year or every visit, which changes the calculus: a first-year teacher gift that feels generous can feel like an odd, hard-to-maintain precedent the following year if it's not something you're prepared to repeat. The individual pages flag which category an occasion falls into, because the "right" amount for a once-only milestone and a recurring courtesy aren't calculated the same way.

When a gift and a group are both involved

A number of these occasions — weddings, retirements, funerals — commonly involve pooling money with coworkers, classmates, or extended family rather than giving individually, and the etiquette for a pooled contribution genuinely differs from what you'd give on your own. Where that's the common practice for a given occasion, the dedicated page addresses it directly, including how contributions are usually organized and what a reasonable per-person amount looks like within a group.

Timing is part of the etiquette, not just the amount

Several of these occasions carry a customary window for when the gift should arrive, and missing it reads differently than giving a smaller amount would. A wedding gift has historically been acceptable well after the ceremony itself, while a funeral contribution or a condolence gift is time-sensitive in a way that makes promptness matter more than size. Where an occasion has a real expected timeframe, the dedicated page states it, since arriving late with a generous gift and arriving on time with a modest one are not interchangeable choices.

A gift-amount calculator, if you'd rather skip the reading

If you already know the occasion and your relationship to the recipient and just want a fast suggested number, the wedding gift calculator turns those two inputs into a specific range in seconds. The individual occasion pages here are the better read when you want the reasoning behind the number as well — why that range, why it shifts with relationship, and what the regional or cultural variations look like for that specific event.