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The FINRA gift rule now caps business-related gifts at $300 per person per year, up from $100, and the new limit took effect on March 30, 2026. It applies to gifts a broker-dealer or its people give to someone in connection with that person’s employer’s business. Several kinds of gifts sit outside the cap entirely, including nominal logo items.
That last part is where most of the confusion sits right now. A lot of the gift guides still floating around say $100, because the number didn’t move for decades. And plenty of firms still run internal policies written around the old figure, which is fine (stricter is allowed), as long as everyone knows which number they’re actually working to.
So before the holiday orders go in, it’s worth reading the rule the way the people who order the gifts will use it. Not the way a compliance manual phrases it.
What the FINRA gift rule says now
The rule is FINRA Rule 3220, and the change came through Regulatory Notice 26-05. The SEC approved the amendment on February 12, 2026. Gifts given before March 30 still count against the old $100 figure.
The notice did more than change the number. It wrote years of scattered guidance into the rule itself, which makes the day-to-day questions much easier to answer:
- Valuation. A gift is valued at cost, not counting tax or delivery. Event tickets count at the higher of cost or face value.
- Aggregation. Every gift from the firm and all of its associated persons to the same recipient is added together. Your procedures have to say whether that year is calendar, fiscal or rolling.
- Records. Covered gifts have to be reported to the firm, reviewed and kept on record. The person giving the gift can’t be the one who decides whether it’s business-related.
That aggregation point matters more than the headline number. Three advisors who each send the same institutional contact a $120 gift have, together, gone over.
Who the $300 limit covers
The limit covers gifts given in relation to the recipient’s employer’s business. In practice that means employees of institutional customers, vendors and counterparties: the pension consultant, the treasurer at a corporate client, the trader on the other side.
It does not cover gifts to individuals who aren’t employees of an institutional customer, which includes individual retail customers. It also doesn’t cover gifts a firm gives its own people.
But that isn’t a free pass for retail client gifts. Firm policy usually still applies, and other rules can be stricter than FINRA’s. A Morgan Lewis client alert lists several that stayed where they were: gifts to ERISA plan fiduciaries are treated as insubstantial under $250 from one source, union officials have a $250 disclosure threshold, and state and local pay-to-play rules restrict gifts to public officials. Insurance agents also answer to state anti-rebating rules, which vary.
So which limit applies? It depends on who the recipient is, who employs them and what your firm is registered as. That’s a compliance call, every time.
What doesn’t count toward the limit
Several kinds of gifts are excluded from the $300 cap and from the recordkeeping, as long as they fit the description:
- Promotional items of nominal value that carry the firm’s logo. The notice’s own examples are umbrellas, tote bags and shirts.
- De minimis items such as pens, notepads and modest desk ornaments, valued substantially below $300.
- Commemorative items that are solely decorative and mark a business transaction (the classic deal toy).
- Personal gifts for infrequent life events like a wedding or a birth, when they’re customary and reasonable (gifts the firm pays for are presumed not to be personal).
- Bereavement gifts that are customary and reasonable.
The rule doesn’t put a dollar figure on “nominal” or “de minimis.” The notice only says items near $300 won’t qualify. So a branded tote is plainly fine. A logo on an expensive jacket probably doesn’t make it nominal.
That’s useful for anyone running branded merchandise at a financial services firm. A lot of what a branch hands out every week (pens, notepads, umbrellas, shirts at a client event) sits outside the limit, provided it stays modest and carries the mark.
Client gifts that fit the FINRA gift rule
Here’s how the common choices tend to land. Your compliance team has the final word, and your firm’s internal cap may be lower than $300.
| Gift | How it’s usually treated | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Logo pen, notepad, umbrella, tote | Nominal promotional or de minimis item, outside the cap | Keep it modest; a premium version may not be nominal |
| Logo shirt or quarter-zip at a client event | Promotional item if nominal value | Higher-end apparel is the gray area |
| Holiday gift box, food, wine | Counts toward $300 at cost, excluding tax and shipping | Add it to anything else that contact got this year |
| Engraved or premium desk item | Counts toward $300 | Personalization is part of the cost |
| Gift card | Counts at face value | Many firm policies restrict cash equivalents |
| Deal toy after a closed transaction | Commemorative, excluded | Must be solely decorative |
The gifts that go wrong are rarely the expensive ones. They’re the second and third gifts to the same person, sent by different people, in the same year.
Where firms still go over
Firms usually go over through repeat gifts to the same person, not one expensive gift. The holiday gift goes out from the home office, then a regional manager sends something after a review meeting, then an advisor brings a bottle to a lunch. Each one is reasonable on its own.
Events are the other one. A client seminar gift bag that includes a nice item can push someone over a limit they were already close to, and nobody notices until the reconciliation.
And timing catches people out. If your firm aggregates on a calendar year, a December gift and a January gift sit in different years. On a rolling year, they don’t.
Building a gift program advisors can’t break
The cleanest fix is to make going over impossible rather than relying on everyone to remember the rule. That’s how we set up financial services programs: compliance approves a catalog once, client-facing items sit in a value band they choose, and anything above it simply isn’t orderable.
From there, branches and advisors order from the approved range in a company store built around those limits. Every order lands in one place, so there’s a single record of who received what, which makes the rule’s reporting and recordkeeping far easier to keep up with. Logo promotional items go in their own section, so nobody has to guess which side of the line they’re on.
The artwork matters too. A plain logo is treated very differently from a tagline that makes a claim, so we keep client-facing items to the mark and send artwork to your reviewers before anything is produced. There are no setup, storage or monthly fees, so there’s no recurring line item for anyone to re-justify every year.
If you’re weighing that against running it all in-house, our guide to choosing a corporate swag company covers the trade-offs.
Before you order this year’s holiday gifts
Three things are worth settling with compliance before anything ships. Which number your firm works to (FINRA’s $300 or a stricter internal one). Whether you aggregate by calendar, fiscal or rolling year. And whether any recipients fall under stricter rules, like plan fiduciaries, union officials or public employees.
Once those are on paper, picking the gifts is the easy part.
If you’d like a catalog built inside your firm’s value bands, with compliance review before anything is made, request a demo and we’ll put a proposed program together for you.
