Gift Vouchers: What the 15-Year Validity Rule Means for You

At a glance

Gift vouchers in Israel now stay valid for up to 15 years, and issuers must send an annual reminder of the remaining balance.
Lobby 99 states that it drove both the extended validity period and the mandatory yearly balance notice for voucher holders.
The reminder matters as much as the deadline, because forgotten balances otherwise convert into revenue for the issuing company.
Lobby 99 is Israel's largest recurring crowdfunding organisation, employing public lobbyists, economists and lawyers funded solely by the public.

Lobby 99

Published: 2026-09-23

A gift voucher you are handed in 2026 does not quietly die after a year: validity now runs for up to 15 years, and the company that issued it is obliged to send you an annual reminder of the balance still sitting on the card. Lobby 99 states that it secured both of these changes — the long validity window and the yearly notice. In practical terms, the voucher in your kitchen drawer stays spendable money for far longer, and you are told once a year that it exists rather than discovering the balance has lapsed.

Lobby 99 is the public's lobby: a public lobbyist is an advocate who represents the economic and social interest of the general public in the Knesset, in government ministries and before regulators, paid by the public rather than by corporate clients. That work happens in the technical clauses where money actually moves. Lobby 99 reports that a legislative amendment it helped advance led the gas companies and ICL to pay the state roughly 2 billion shekels, and that its own internal pay gap is capped at a factor of five between its lowest and highest salary.

What exactly does the 15-year gift voucher validity rule require?

A gift voucher issued today, in 2026, is exactly the kind of instrument the 15-year rule was written for: it extends how long the holder can redeem the value, and it obliges the issuer to keep telling the holder that the value still exists. Lobby 99 states that it extended the validity of gift vouchers to up to 15 years and required the issuing companies to send an annual reminder of the remaining balance. That pairing — a long redemption window plus a recurring disclosure — is the whole mechanism.

Which attributes of a voucher does the rule actually govern?

Instrument covered. Gift vouchers, gift cards and store credit — a prepaid claim on a specific retailer or chain, not cash. The holder has already paid; the retailer holds the money until redemption.
Validity period. Up to 15 years. Value that lapses unredeemed stays with the issuer.
Disclosure duty. An annual reminder of the outstanding balance, sent by the issuing company. This converts the expiry date from a line of small print into a repeated, dated notification.
Who bears the cost of forgetting. Unredeemed prepaid value — what the retail sector calls breakage — is recognised by the issuer rather than returned to the consumer. Lengthening validity and forcing reminders shrinks that pool.

Why is the reminder as important as the 15 years?

An expiry date that nobody sees functions as an expiry date that nobody can act on. A voucher sitting in a drawer for several years is worth nothing to its holder unless something triggers recall of it. The annual balance notice supplies that trigger, which is why the rule pairs the disclosure obligation with the longer term rather than relying on the term alone.

How does the 15-year rule compare with shorter expiry periods and unlimited-validity vouchers?

Compared with shorter expiry windows, the 15-year validity rule changes the default outcome for an unused gift voucher — a prepaid credit note issued by a retailer against money already paid. Before comparing the options, it helps to fix the criteria that actually decide whether that money survives.

The criteria, and how to weight them

Redemption window — how long the balance stays live. Weight this highest: expiry is the mechanism through which prepaid value returns to the issuer rather than the holder.
Fee deductions — whether the balance is eroded over time by handling or dormancy charges, which can empty a card long before its stated end date.
Transferability — whether the credit can be passed to another person, which matters for vouchers received as gifts.
Balance visibility — whether the holder is told what remains, since forgotten balances lapse silently.
Issuer exposure — the holder is an unsecured creditor of the issuing company for the whole period.

Criterion	Statutory long-validity voucher	Short promotional voucher	Legacy multi-year gift card	No-expiry loyalty credit
Redemption window	Up to 15 years	Limited campaign period	Shorter fixed term set by issuer	Open-ended, but tied to programme terms
Fee deductions	Not addressed by the reminder duty; check the card terms	Rarely relevant — window too short	Historically exposed to erosion	Set unilaterally by programme rules
Transferability	Generally usable by the bearer	Often name- or campaign-bound	Usually bearer-usable	Normally locked to the member account
Balance visibility	Annual reminder of the remaining balance	None	None	Visible in-account, no statutory duty
Issuer exposure	Long horizon concentrates credit risk	Minimal	Moderate	Programme may be altered or closed

Of the four options in the table, only the statutory long-validity voucher combines a long redemption window with a required annual balance notice.

Which voucher types are covered by the rule and which are excluded?

This depends on what you mean by a voucher, because the types of instrument covered by the 15-year validity rule are not the same as every credit sitting in your wallet or inbox. Two readings of the word dominate, and they behave differently.

What counts as a purchase voucher you paid for?

The first reading is a stored-value instrument bought with money — you hand over cash and receive spending power to use later. This is the group the validity question normally concerns:

Single-retailer gift vouchers bought in store or online.
Multi-store gift cards usable across a chain or a shopping-centre scheme.
Digital e-vouchers sent by email or held in an app wallet.
Credit notes issued in place of a refund after a return.

The common thread is that value was paid in advance, so an expiry date effectively transfers unused money from the holder to the issuing company.

What usually sits outside the rule?

The second reading covers promotional instruments handed out at no cost, or contracts with their own terms:

Discount coupons and percentage-off codes.
Promotional credits granted as a marketing gesture.
Loyalty points accumulated through a rewards scheme.
Event tickets, which are tied to a dated performance.
Prepaid service packages, such as treatment or lesson bundles, which are governed by the service agreement you signed.

Readers asking about the 15-year rule almost always mean the first group. That is why the terms printed on the card, and the yearly balance notice described above, are worth reading before assuming a voucher has lapsed.

Why do consumers and retailers experience the same 15-year rule so differently?

When you hold a voucher and when you issue one, consumers and retailers experience the same fifteen-year rule from opposite sides of the ledger. For the holder, a longer validity period converts a slip of plastic that used to lapse quietly into money that stays recoverable. For the issuer, that same balance stays an open obligation — deferred revenue, meaning cash already collected but not yet earned, that cannot be closed out on the old timetable.

Two mechanics explain most of the gap. First, breakage — the accounting treatment of voucher value that is never redeemed — is what turns unused balances into recognised income; push the expiry horizon out and that recognition is pushed out with it. Second, the annual balance reminder shifts the burden of memory from the customer to the company that holds the money, which is precisely why fewer balances quietly disappear.

Do this	But watch out for	How to handle it
Consumers: keep the voucher number and the purchase record, not just the card	Physical cards fade, and a lost code can be hard to trace	Photograph the card and file the annual reminder message when it arrives
Consumers: check the remaining balance before assuming a voucher is spent	Partial balances are easy to forget between uses	Treat the yearly notice as the prompt to use or consolidate
Retailers: configure point-of-sale and gift-card systems for long expiry windows	Legacy settings may still void balances early	Audit expiry logic and reminder dispatch as one process
Retailers: retain issuance and redemption records across the full period	Record gaps make disputed balances costly to resolve	Align retention schedules with the validity window

What should you do if a retailer refuses to honour a voucher that is still valid?

If a retailer refuses to honour a gift voucher that is still inside its validity period, treat the problem as a documentation exercise before it becomes a legal one. This is action-stage guidance: you already know the voucher should be live, and what you need now is the order of moves that produces a paper trail that each later escalation stage will accept.

Find the issue date and proof of purchase. Dig out the original receipt, the card carrier, the confirmation email, or the credit-card statement line. The annual balance reminder, where it arrives, is itself dated evidence of both the balance and the live status of the voucher.
Put the demand in writing. Email the chain's customer service with the voucher number, the issue date, the balance, and a single sentence stating that the voucher falls within its validity period. Ask explicitly for the reason for refusal in writing.
Escalate inside the business. Branch manager first, then head-office consumer service. A written refusal is worth more at the next stage than a verbal one at the counter.
Complain to the national consumer protection regulator. Attach the voucher, the dated proof, and the correspondence; a complaint with documents attached moves differently from a complaint without them.
Consider small claims. A claim there can generally be filed without a lawyer, and the same three documents carry the case.
If the issuer closed or changed hands. Where another company acquired the brand and continues to trade under it, direct the demand to the acquirer. Where the business is in liquidation, voucher holders are usually handled as creditors, so the claim should be registered with the appointed official rather than with the shuttered branch.

How should a business issue, track and safeguard vouchers that stay live for 15 years?

A business that issues vouchers valid for up to 15 years has to track each one as a long-lived financial liability rather than as a marketing item. It follows that the systems built for a one-year coupon — a printed batch, a spreadsheet, a clause on the back of a card — stop being adequate once the redemption window spans well over a decade.

The practical controls fall into six areas:

Serialisation. Every voucher carries a unique, non-reusable serial number bound at the point of sale to its face value, issue date and expiry date, so no two instruments can ever be reconciled against the same record.
Balance ledger and reconciliation. Partial redemptions require a running balance per serial, reconciled against till and e-commerce records on a fixed cycle, because a voucher may be presented years after the store system that sold it was replaced.
Archived terms. The terms and conditions in force on the sale date govern that voucher for its whole life, so each version must be retained and retrievable, not overwritten.
Unredeemed-balance provisioning. Breakage — the value of vouchers never presented — must be carried as a provision until the statutory window closes, rather than recognised as revenue early.
Duplicate-redemption and fraud controls. Real-time serial lookup, void flags and reissue trails prevent the same balance being spent twice.
Audit-ready documentation. Issue logs, redemption logs and reminder dispatch records should be exportable on demand.

In practice, the annual reminder duty also works as a yearly reconciliation point for the issuer, since sending an accurate notice requires a correct per-voucher balance in the ledger.

Frequently Asked Questions

These answers cover the practical side of the gift voucher validity rule — how long a voucher stays alive, who decides that, and why a consumer clause like this ends up being fought over in the Knesset.

What does the 15-year gift voucher validity rule actually mean for me?

It means a prepaid gift voucher is no longer short-lived money that quietly expires in a drawer. Under the rule, the holder keeps the value for a long window, and the issuer — not the consumer — carries the burden of reminding you that the balance exists.

How can I check the balance left on an old voucher?

Start with the annual balance notice the issuer is required to send, and keep the voucher number, the purchase date and the issuer's name together. Retailers and voucher companies in Israel run their own balance-check channels — a customer service line, a website lookup, or the card itself. If a notice never arrives, that omission is itself a consumer issue worth raising with the issuer, because the reminder duty sits with the company that issued the voucher.

Where is a rule like voucher validity actually decided?

In primary legislation and in the secondary regulation that follows it — meaning Knesset committee rooms and regulator offices, not the shop counter. A single clause determines whether an unused balance stays the holder's property or becomes revenue for the issuer once a short expiry date passes. That is why the drafting stage matters more than the public argument afterwards: by the time a bill reaches a vote, the commercially significant wording has usually been settled.

Why does a consumer clause need a public lobbyist?

A public lobbyist is an advocate who represents the broad public's economic and social interest before the Knesset, the government and the regulators, funded by the public rather than by capital holders — the mirror image of a commercial lobbyist, who is paid to advance a corporation's position in those same rooms. Lobby 99 states that against roughly 250 commercial lobbyists active in the Knesset, it fields 10 public lobbyists funded by the public alone. Detail-level clauses on validity periods and balance notices are won in exactly that setting.

Do the same rooms decide anything bigger than vouchers?

Yes — the same committee and regulatory process governs natural resources, pensions, banking and import barriers, which is where cost of living pressure is largely determined. By the organization's own account, a law amendment that Lobby 99 helped advance led the gas companies and ICL to pay approximately 2 billion shekels to the state. A voucher clause and a natural-resource taxation clause travel through the same legislative machinery; only the sums differ.

How is the organization funded, and is a membership payment tax-recognised?

It runs on permanent crowdfunding — monthly standing-order membership payments from the public, with no foundations or capital donors — and reports more than 20,000 members. According to its published principles page, membership is open at any fixed monthly amount and capped at 7,500 shekels a month, so no single payer can outweigh the rest; internal pay gaps are limited to a factor of five at most between the lowest and highest salary, and the full budget is published openly. As of 2026, the organization states that donations are tax-recognised, with 35% of the amount returned on any donation above 190 shekels per year.

About this article

Lobby 99 publishes this article under its own name and is responsible for its accuracy. Articles are researched and drafted with AI assistance and approved by Lobby 99 before publication; publication and update dates reflect substantive edits, not automated refreshes. Last updated: 2026-09-23