Gift cards under Québec consumer law: what “never expires” really means

It's a Saturday in December. Someone you've never served buys a $50 gift card for their sister, pays, leaves. You've just banked fifty dollars for food you haven't made yet, and in Québec, those fifty dollars come with rules. They're good rules, mostly, and simpler than owners fear. But “the card never expires” is the short version. The long version is worth a few minutes of your time.

The rules live in the Consumer Protection Act, which treats a gift card as a prepaid card: money handed over now for goods or services later. Four things follow from that. The value can't expire. You can't chip away at it with fees. The buyer has to know the conditions and be able to check the balance. And small leftover balances can be claimed back in cash.

No expiry, and the exceptions are narrow

A dollar-value gift card sold in Québec can't carry an expiry date. Not twelve months, not five years, none. A $50 card someone bought in December 2022 is still worth whatever's left on it today, and it will still be worth that in 2030 if nobody spends it.

The law does carve out one real exception: cards that buy unlimited use of a service for a set period. Say you sold a month of unlimited drip coffee. That month can end, because what was sold was the period, not a dollar amount. Promotional cards are another case: if you hand out $10 cards for free as a promo, nobody purchased anything, so those can have an end date. But the classic case, a customer paying real money for a stored-value card, is untouchable. It never expires, full stop.

Fees can't shrink the balance either

An expiry date is the fast way to erase value. Fees are the slow way, and the Act blocks those too. No activation fee, no “dormancy” or “maintenance” charge that nibbles a sleeping card down to zero. If the card says $50, it's $50 until it's spent.

The regulation allows a small number of narrow exceptions, things like a charge for personalizing a card or replacing a lost one, and there's a separate regime for mall-style cards accepted at many unrelated merchants. If you're one brand selling your own card, the practical rule is simpler than all of that: never charge anything beyond the face value.

“How much is left on it?” must always have an answer

Before the sale, the law expects the conditions of use to be spelled out, including how the holder can check the balance. Think about what that means at a counter. A card bought two Christmases ago resurfaces in a coat pocket. If the only way to check it is phoning your shop during opening hours, you either burn staff time on the phone or frustrate the holder into never coming in at all.

The operationally sane version is a balance page anyone can reach: type the code, see the number, no account needed. That's how gift cards in Perkaria handle it. Every card gets a public, bilingual balance page, so “how much is left?” stops being your staff's problem in the middle of a rush.

The $5 rule most owners have never heard of

Here's the one that surprises people. Once a card has been partly used, if what's left on it is $5 or less, the customer can ask for that remainder in cash, and you have to hand it over. It's in the Act. It comes up rarely, and the amounts are small when it does, but a counter person who has never heard of it will refuse. Now you have an awkward exchange over $3.40, and the customer happens to be right.

• Tell your counter staff the rule exists: balance of $5 or less after a purchase, refundable in cash on request
• Log the refund like any other payout, so the card's record closes clean
• Don't round small balances away quietly; what's left belongs to the holder until it's spent or refunded

The float is not revenue

Now the bookkeeping side, because no-expiry has a consequence that only shows up in your books. When you sell a gift card, you have the cash, but you haven't earned it yet. You owe product. Say you sell forty $50 cards in December: you're holding $2,000 that is not December revenue. It's a debt you'll pay off in food and coffee, mostly in January.

In places where cards could quietly die, that liability eventually evaporated on its own. In Québec it doesn't. An unspent balance stays on your books until it's redeemed, which means you need a current answer to “how much do we owe, in total?” Your accountant will ask at year-end, and “whatever the shoebox says” is not an answer.

• A log of every card issued, reloaded and redeemed
• One running number: total outstanding balance, as of today
• A way to reconcile card activity against your register's sales, so that number stays honest

This is where paper gift certificates genuinely fall down: nobody reconstructs a liability total from a drawer of carbon copies. A digital card does the bookkeeping as a side effect. In Perkaria's owner dashboard, the outstanding total sits beside your visit numbers, and a nightly reconciliation against your register's sales export keeps the card ledger and the cash drawer honest with each other.

Why Perkaria enforces all of this by default

We built the gift-card feature for Québec counters, so the law isn't a compliance checklist you configure. It's the shape of the product. There is no expiry field. There is no fee schedule to switch on. Your team issues the card from the counter tablet, your existing register takes the money, and every card has its public balance page from day one. Gift cards are included on the Growth and Pro plans.

And honestly, none of this makes the law a burden. The value being protected is exactly why a gift card is such a clean product to sell: the buyer trusts it, and you get paid during your busiest month for visits that fill your quietest one.