Gift voucher rules for New Zealand hair salons: the law, the GST and the tracking

A gift voucher is the easiest sale a hair salon makes all year. Someone walks in, pays full price, takes a piece of card and leaves without using a minute of chair time. In December, when every New Zealander is hunting for a present that is not another pair of socks, a NZ$80 cut-and-finish voucher sells itself.

It is also the most misunderstood product in the salon. A voucher is not revenue the day you sell it, it is a promise. It is covered by consumer law that changed in March 2026, it has GST timing rules of its own, and it quietly follows you around if you ever sell the salon or switch software. Most of the advice online is written for big retailers; almost none of it talks about a three-chair salon in Hamilton selling forty vouchers before Christmas.

This guide covers what the law actually requires in New Zealand, what is merely good practice, how the money and GST work, and how to track vouchers properly. One point to settle upfront, because this blog belongs to a booking software company: ViteUneCoupe is a free online booking system for hair salons, and it does not sell or track gift vouchers. The booking page brings the voucher recipient into your chair; the voucher log stays yours. We would rather tell you that plainly than pretend otherwise.

The law changed on 16 March 2026: three years minimum

New Zealand used to have no statutory minimum expiry for gift vouchers. Twelve-month vouchers were standard, six-month vouchers were legal, and whatever was printed on the card applied. That era is over.

The Fair Trading (Gift Card Expiry) Amendment Act 2024 came into force on 16 March 2026 (legislation.govt.nz, checked in October 2026). Since that date, in trade, you must not sell a consumer a gift card or voucher with an expiry date less than three years after the date of sale. The Commerce Commission's guidance (comcom.govt.nz, checked in October 2026) spells out the practical rules for a salon:

• Three years is the floor, not the recommendation. You can give five years or no expiry at all; you cannot give less than three.
• The expiry must be easy to find. Show the expiry date itself, the sale date plus the redemption period, or the words "no expiry", prominently on the voucher or easily accessible to whoever holds it.
• It covers vouchers in any form. Printed card, PDF emailed to the buyer, a code sold through your website: if it was sold and is redeemable for goods or services, the rules apply. The exclusions (prepaid power or bus cards, loyalty rewards generated automatically, cards for one-off time-limited events) do not describe anything a hair salon normally sells.
• It is not retrospective. A voucher you sold in 2025 with a 12-month expiry keeps that expiry. Only vouchers sold from 16 March 2026 must carry the three years.
• There are real penalties. The Commerce Commission can issue infringement notices of up to NZ$1,000 per breach, and prosecution can bring fines of up to NZ$30,000 for a company or NZ$10,000 for an individual (figures from the Commission's gift card guidance, checked in October 2026).

One trap worth naming: a voucher sold with no stated expiry. Consumer Protection's guidance is that a voucher with no specified expiry can be used at any time (consumerprotection.govt.nz, checked in October 2026), while business.govt.nz describes a default three-year period when nothing is stated (business.govt.nz, checked in October 2026). Do not leave your salon in that grey zone: decide what you mean, and print it on every voucher.

If you still have a drawer of pre-printed vouchers that say "valid 12 months", they are no longer sellable as they stand. Overprint them, sticker them, or reprint: selling one after 16 March 2026 is a breach even if you personally intend to honour it longer.

What is law and what is just good practice

The three-year minimum, the prominent expiry and the honest description of what the voucher buys are law. A surprising amount of the rest is your call, and worth deciding before December rather than at the till:

• Honouring expired vouchers. Once a lawful expiry has passed, you do not have to accept the voucher. Many salons still do, in full or as a percentage, because the voucher was paid for and the goodwill is worth more than the service cost. Decide your line once and brief the team, so the answer does not depend on who is on reception.
• Lost vouchers. You are not obliged to replace a lost voucher. If your vouchers are numbered and made out to a named recipient, you can afford to be generous, because you can check your log and cancel the lost number. That single habit turns "sorry, nothing we can do" into "give me a second, I will reissue it".
• Change from a voucher. If a NZ$100 voucher pays for an NZ$85 appointment, nothing in the law forces you to hand over NZ$15 in cash. The usual practice is to leave the balance on the voucher or issue a new one for the remainder. Print your rule on the voucher.
• Transferability. A voucher is a gift by definition; let it be used by whoever holds it unless you have a strong reason not to.

Whatever you decide, write the terms on the voucher itself: expiry, balance rule, replacement rule. These are your terms to set, as long as they are accurate, not misleading, and the expiry respects the three-year floor. Treat any template you find online, including this list, as a starting point to adapt, not a guaranteed-compliant document.

The Consumer Guarantees Act does not go away at redemption

A client who walks in with a voucher has the same rights in the chair as one who taps a card on the way out. The Consumer Guarantees Act requires services to be carried out with reasonable care and skill, fit for purpose and completed in a reasonable time (consumerprotection.govt.nz on the CGA, checked in October 2026). If a colour correction done against a voucher goes wrong, the remedy is the same as for a paid appointment: put it right.

The one voucher-specific wrinkle is service vouchers and price rises. A voucher that says "full head of foils with Mia" is a promise to deliver that service, even if your price list has moved twice in the three years the voucher stays valid. Our guide to hair salon prices in New Zealand covers how often NZ salons review their lists; a three-year voucher will usually outlive at least one price rise. Which leads directly to the next point.

Selling vouchers well: dollar amounts beat service names

The simplest protection against your own future price list is to sell vouchers for dollar amounts, not services:

• A NZ$100 voucher is always worth NZ$100. If the cut-and-finish is NZ$95 today and NZ$110 in 2028, the client tops up the difference and nobody argues at reception.
• A "cut and blow wave" voucher is worth whatever that costs on the day it comes back. Sold at NZ$85, redeemed three years later when the service is NZ$105, the NZ$20 gap is yours to absorb. Multiply by every service voucher in circulation.
• Round numbers sell. NZ$50, NZ$80, NZ$100, NZ$150 cover everything from a dry cut to a half head of foils. Suggest the amount that matches a real service ("a cut and finish here is NZ$95, most people give NZ$100") so the gift feels concrete without locking you into a price.

Your salon prices are normally displayed GST-inclusive, so a NZ$100 voucher is simply NZ$100 off a GST-inclusive bill; no client-facing GST gymnastics needed.

Then sell them like you mean it. December is the season: vouchers at the till and in the window from mid November, a decent card and envelope rather than a till receipt, a line in your pre-Christmas email, and a one-sentence suggestion at checkout ("stuck on a present? a voucher from us takes ten seconds"). Mother's Day in May is the second wave. A voucher programme that only exists when a client asks sells a handful a year; one that is visible for six weeks before Christmas sells dozens, and every one of them is cash in December for a chair filled in February, usually by someone who has never been in your salon before. That last part is the real prize: a voucher is a warm introduction to a new client, paid for by one of your regulars.

The accounting reality: a sold voucher is a liability, not revenue

The NZ$100 that lands in the till when you sell a voucher feels like income. For accounting purposes it is not, yet. You have taken money for a service you have not delivered: until the voucher is redeemed or expires, that NZ$100 is a liability on your books, money the salon owes in haircuts. A salon that sells NZ$4,000 of vouchers in December (a deliberately made-up figure) and spends it all by January has effectively borrowed from its February self.

GST has its own timing question, and it is genuinely one for your accountant. Inland Revenue's rules on vouchers (ird.govt.nz, special supplies, checked in October 2026) distinguish two cases:

• Vouchers with no fixed dollar value are treated as a supply when the customer buys them: GST is accounted for at the time of sale.
• Vouchers with a face value can be accounted for at redemption instead of sale, but only where the required conditions are met, including agreement between the issuer and the redeemer where they are different parties.

For a single salon that both sells and redeems its own vouchers, the practical difference is whether GST on a voucher sold in late November falls in your November-December return or in the period when the voucher is actually used, and what happens to vouchers that are never redeemed at all. The clean move is to pick a treatment with your accountant once, write it down, and apply it to every voucher. Do not improvise this in myIR at 11 pm. And remember the wider context: GST registration is compulsory once your turnover reaches NZ$60,000 in any 12 months (ird.govt.nz, checked in October 2026), and a strong voucher season counts towards that turnover.

A word on the vouchers that never come back. Some percentage of vouchers is never redeemed; you will see this called "breakage" in retail. It is real money, but do not spend it in advance: under the new three-year floor a voucher can resurface years later, and how and when unredeemed value is recognised as income is, again, an accountant conversation, not a vibe.

Tracking vouchers: a numbered log, nothing fancier

Everything above collapses without one boring tool: a voucher register. Every voucher gets a sequential number, and the log records, for each one:

A spreadsheet does this perfectly well for a salon selling tens of vouchers a year. The paper vouchers themselves should be hard to improvise: numbered at print time, signed when sold, no blank stack sitting unsecured by the till.

Can software do it? Some salon platforms sold in New Zealand include gift voucher sales and tracking as a feature, and if vouchers are a big part of your business, that is a fair reason to shortlist them: check each vendor's own site for what is included at which price. Honesty requires repeating it here: ViteUneCoupe does not manage gift vouchers. There is no voucher sale, balance or redemption feature, on any plan. What it does is the other half of the job, free and with 0% commission: the recipient of your voucher goes to your booking page, picks a slot at 9 pm on a Sunday, and lands in your calendar and your client database as a brand-new client you can retain. The voucher log next to it stays a spreadsheet, and for most salons that is genuinely enough.

Vouchers when you switch software, sell the salon or close

A voucher is a three-year promise, which means it outlives software contracts and sometimes owners.

• Switching booking or salon software. If your current platform tracks your vouchers, export the full register before you cancel: numbers, balances, expiry dates. Outstanding vouchers do not expire because your subscription did, and reconstructing balances from memory in front of a client is not a position you want to be in. Our guide to switching salon booking software in New Zealand covers the whole exit checklist; the voucher export belongs on it, right next to the client database.
• Selling the salon. Outstanding vouchers are a liability of the business, and what happens to them is a negotiation point in the sale: typically the buyer honours them and the purchase price reflects the outstanding balance. A clean, numbered register makes that conversation a five-minute line item; a shoebox of unnumbered cards makes it a discount on your sale price.
• Closing for good. If the business fails, voucher holders are generally unsecured creditors, and Consumer Protection's guidance is blunt: it is unlikely they will get their money back (consumerprotection.govt.nz, gone out of business, checked in October 2026). If you are winding down in an orderly way, stop selling vouchers early and honour the outstanding ones while you still can. It is the difference between a salon remembered well and a Facebook thread you do not want to star in.

A voucher no-show still costs you the slot

One last operational detail that voucher guides never mention. A client booking with a voucher has already paid, so she feels no financial pull towards showing up, yet her no-show costs you exactly what any no-show costs: a chair held empty that another client wanted. Worse, the slot is often a long one, because voucher appointments skew towards the treat end of the menu.

So voucher bookings deserve the same discipline as any booking: confirmation when the appointment is made and a reminder before it. On ViteUneCoupe's Standard plan (from 29 € excl. tax per month, no lock-in; note the subscription is billed in euros, so the NZD amount on your statement moves with the exchange rate and your bank may add a foreign-transaction fee), confirmation, reminder and thank-you emails go out automatically. By email only, to be clear: ViteUneCoupe does not send SMS reminders, and competitors that do have a real advantage on that channel. The full playbook, including what to do about repeat offenders, is in our guide to reducing no-shows in a New Zealand hair salon, and if you take deposits for long appointments, think through how a deposit interacts with a voucher in your cancellation policy before the situation arises at reception.

Sell vouchers with enthusiasm, print the terms, keep the register, and let your accountant pick the GST treatment once. Done that way, every voucher is December cash, a February client and a tidy line in a spreadsheet, instead of a promise you lost track of.

Frequently asked questions

What is the minimum expiry for a gift voucher sold by a NZ hair salon?

Three years from the date of sale, for any voucher sold from 16 March 2026, under the Fair Trading (Gift Card Expiry) Amendment Act 2024. You can offer longer, or no expiry, but not shorter, and the expiry must be shown prominently. Vouchers sold before 16 March 2026 keep whatever expiry they were sold with.

Do I have to honour a voucher after it expires?

No. Once a lawfully set expiry has passed, you are not obliged to accept the voucher. Many salons choose to honour expired vouchers anyway, in full or in part, because the money was paid and the goodwill is cheap. Decide your policy once and make sure the whole team gives the same answer.

Should my salon sell dollar-amount vouchers or service vouchers?

Dollar amounts, in almost every case. A NZ$100 voucher is worth NZ$100 whenever it is redeemed; a "cut and colour" voucher is a promise to deliver that service at whatever it costs up to three years later, so every price rise eats your margin on vouchers already in circulation.

When do I account for GST on a gift voucher?

It depends on the voucher. Inland Revenue treats vouchers with no fixed value as a supply when sold; face-value vouchers can, under conditions, be accounted for at redemption instead. The right treatment for your salon depends on how your vouchers work and should be agreed once with your accountant, then applied consistently.

Do I have to replace a lost gift voucher?

No, there is no legal obligation. But if your vouchers are numbered and your register records the buyer and recipient, you can verify the claim, cancel the lost number and reissue it, which costs you nothing and wins a client for life.

Does ViteUneCoupe manage gift vouchers?

No. ViteUneCoupe is a free online booking system for hair salons, with unlimited bookings, 0% commission, a booking page and a client database; it has no gift voucher sale or tracking feature on any plan. Keep your voucher register in a numbered spreadsheet alongside it, and let the booking page turn voucher recipients into regular clients.