Thanksgiving Cards and the Regulated Professions: It's the Ask, Not the Card

I am a printer, not a lawyer and not a compliance officer. What follows is the rule text with the citation attached, so you can take it to someone who is. I am writing it because the numbers in circulation on this subject are wrong, and they are wrong in a direction that costs you a card you were entitled to send.

Two of them, right at the top.

The $100 figure is out of date. It is $300.

FINRA's gift limit sat at $100 from 1992 until March 30, 2026, when it rose to $300. The paper trail in order, because four dates get quoted interchangeably and only one of them is the one that matters: the SEC approved it February 12, 2026 (Release No. 34-104830, File No. SR-FINRA-2025-003); it hit the Federal Register February 18, 2026 at 91 FR 7570; FINRA issued Regulatory Notice 26-05 on February 27, 2026; and it took effect March 30, 2026. Thirty-four years at one number is why every summary written before this spring still says $100.

Including FINRA's own. As of this writing the gifts FAQ on finra.org still reads "in excess of $100 per year," six months after the amendment took effect. If your compliance officer quotes you $100 from the FAQ page, they are reading a stale page, not a wrong rule. Quote the rulebook.

You will also see $175 quoted as the coming number. That was a 2016 request for comment, Regulatory Notice 16-29. It was never adopted and it is not pending. It is simply dead.

The $25 RESPA limit does not exist

There is no dollar limit in RESPA. Not in 12 U.S.C. § 2607, not in 12 CFR § 1024.14. The only dollar figure in the statute is the $10,000 maximum criminal fine. The CFPB says it plainly: "There is no exception to RESPA Section 8 solely based on the value of the gift or promotion."

The $25 everybody repeats is 26 U.S.C. § 274(b)(1) — the federal income tax cap on deducting business gifts. It governs what your accountant can write off. It has nothing to do with whether the gift was lawful. Two different bodies of law, and the tax one got borrowed to answer a question it was never asked.

If you are a financial advisor

Here is the finding that surprised me most, and it is new in the rule text.

Supplementary Material .09, added with the March 2026 amendments, reads: "This Rule does not apply to gifts from a member to its own associated persons, or to gifts from a member or an associated person to individual retail customers."

Your own client book sits outside Rule 3220. Not under the limit — outside the rule. That was arguably always true, given what 3220 was written to police, but as of this year it is explicit. Most compliance content on this subject predates it.

Two qualifications travel with that, and they matter more than the headline.

FINRA declined to define "retail customer." It was asked to and expressly did not. So the carve-out's edges are undefined, and the edges are exactly where someone will eventually argue.

Your firm's policy is the real constraint. Regulatory Notice 26-05 says members "may have policies and procedures that restrict or prohibit gifts to individual retail customers." The rule permitting something has never stopped a firm from forbidding it. Ask your firm, not the rulebook.

Where $300 genuinely bites is the other direction: employees of institutional customers, vendors, counterparties. The custodian contact. The referring CPA — and read the rule text closely on that one, because Rule 3220(a) reaches "any person, principal, proprietor, employee, agent or representative of another person." A sole-practitioner CPA or a solo attorney who sends you work is inside the rule in his own right, not merely as somebody's employee. Aggregation is firm-wide per recipient under .03, and recordkeeping applies in any amount under 3220(c) — there is no floor below which you stop writing it down.

One more, because people reach for it and it does not hold. A holiday card is not a "personal gift." Supplementary Material .04 limits that exclusion to "infrequent life events (e.g., a wedding gift or a congratulatory gift for the birth of a child)." Thanksgiving arrives annually. It is not an infrequent life event.

If you are in real estate

Start from the uncomfortable end: a card is a "thing of value." Section 1024.14(d) defines the term to include "things," "without limitation." Anyone telling you cards are exempt is inventing an exemption.

So why is a Thanksgiving card to a past client fine? Because Section 8(a) requires three things together: a thing of value, pursuant to an agreement or understanding, that settlement business shall be referred. The card satisfies the first and nothing satisfies the other two. The gift is never the violation. The agreement is.

One qualifier on that, and it is the one that catches people. Section 1024.14(e) says an agreement "need not be written or verbalized but may be established by a practice, pattern or course of conduct," and that when a thing of value is received repeatedly and is "connected in any way with the volume or value of the business referred," that is evidence of an agreement. So the question for a referral-partner list is not what the card cost. It is how the list was built. A card sent every year to exactly the agents who send you deals, ordered by how much they send, is a pattern, and a pattern is what the regulation says an agreement can be made of.

The CFPB's RESPA FAQs, General Question 6, updated October 7, 2020, answer the direct question — can you give a past client a gift — with "Generally, yes." But read the sentence that follows, because it is the whole risk: giving a consumer an incentive in exchange for referring other business is prohibited.

Which means the dangerous Thanksgiving card is not an expensive one. It is one with "refer a friend and we'll send you a $100 gift card" printed inside it. That sentence is an agreement or understanding that business shall be referred, in writing, mailed to several hundred people, with your name on it.

And the penalty is not scaled to the card. Treble damages under § 2607(d)(2) are three times the settlement charge, not three times the gift.

If you sell insurance, I can only tell you about one state — and it surprised me

Anti-rebating law is state law. There are fifty of them. I read one, and I found the opposite of what I went looking for.

I expected California to cap what an agent can give a client. It does not appear to have a cap at all. California's Unfair Practices Act — Insurance Code § 790.03, read start to finish — does not mention rebates, inducements or gifts. Most states put their anti-rebating prohibition in their version of that act. California's does not contain one.

And the code says so out loud. Insurance Code § 750(d): "Nothing in this section is intended to limit, restrict, or in any way apply to, the rebating of commissions by insurance agents or brokers, as authorized by Proposition 103, enacted by the people at the November 8, 1988, general election." That is California's own statute acknowledging that rebating is authorized there.

There is one real California dollar figure, and it is not the one you will be quoted. Insurance Code § 12404(d)(1) exempts "promotional items with a permanently affixed company logo… with a value of not more than ten dollars ($10) each." Three things travel with it. It binds title insurers, underwritten title companies and controlled escrow companies — not an insurance agency. It is $10 per item, not per person per year. And the logo has to be the giver's, permanently affixed. It has sat unchanged since 2008 and it is indexed to nothing.

If you are in title in California, two more from that same section are worth knowing. § 12404(c)(8) makes expenditures for "food, beverages, and entertainment for a person" unlawful inducements outright — stricter than RESPA, which would weigh the same lunch on facts and circumstances. And § 12404(e) says consideration for the referral of title business not listed in the section "shall not be presumed lawful merely because they are not specifically prohibited." The absence of a rule is not a permission.

Let me scope that honestly. I found no per-person-per-year cap in California's anti-rebating provisions, its unfair-practices act, or the Proposition 103 rate sections. I did not read the whole Insurance Code, and I am not telling you what your state says. Your state may well have a number — after the NAIC broadened the rebate and inducement exceptions in its model act around 2020, a number of states adopted exactly the per-person caps California lacks. Go and read yours, or have somebody read it for you. Whoever quotes you a figure without a section number has not.

The through-line: it is the ask, not the card

Read those three bodies of law together and the same shape appears in all of them.

RESPA needs an agreement that business shall be referred. FINRA's concern is inducement. Anti-rebating is about inducement to buy a policy. Every one of them is aimed at a quid pro quo.

A card that says thank you and asks for nothing does not engage the mechanism, in any of the three. A card that asks for a referral, dangles a discount, or arrives with a renewal reminder tucked inside has stopped being a thank-you and started being an offer — and an offer is the thing all three regimes were written about.

Which is the best argument I know for the plain version. Say thank you. Sign it. Send it. Do not put a call to action in a gratitude card, and most of this stops being your problem.

Take the citations above to your compliance officer or your counsel. They are the rule text and the release numbers, which is more than you will get from most of what is written on this.