# How many stamps should a loyalty card have?

> Most loyalty cards sit between six and ten stamps, but the right number for your business comes from two things: what the reward costs you, and how often your customers already visit. Here's how to work it out.

Published 3 November 2026 by Harry Northam, Founder, Promotello.
Source: https://www.promotello.com/blog/how-many-stamps-loyalty-card

## Key takeaways

- Most cards land between six and ten stamps. Fewer than five feels like a giveaway; more than twelve feels unreachable.
- Work out the number from your margin: the reward should cost you a small share of what the full card brings in.
- Match the card to how often people already visit, so a full card takes weeks or months, not years.
- A card customers can finish is worth more than a generous reward they never reach.
- You can change the number later, but honour cards already in progress.

Ask ten shop owners and you will get ten answers. The honest one is that there is no magic number, but there is a way to work out yours, and it takes about ten minutes.

The short version: **most loyalty cards sit between six and ten stamps**. Below five the reward feels like a giveaway and stops meaning anything. Above twelve it starts to feel unreachable, and a card that feels unreachable gets left in a drawer.

Where you land inside that range comes down to two questions.

## What does the reward cost you?

Start with the reward, not the number of stamps. Work out what it actually costs you to give away — the ingredients and the staff minute, not the menu price.

A worked example for a café:

|                   |             |
| ----------------- | ----------- |
| Coffee sells for  | £3.20       |
| Costs you to make | about £0.80 |
| Profit per coffee | about £2.40 |

On a nine-stamp card, a customer buys nine coffees and gets the tenth free. You have taken about £21.60 in profit and given back about 80p of cost. The loyalty has cost you under 4% of what that customer spent.

Now run the same sum on a five-stamp card: five coffees, £12 of profit, the same 80p cost. Still fine. The maths rarely breaks for a café, which is why cafés can afford short cards.

Try it with a £45 haircut where the reward is a free cut:

|                   |                             |
| ----------------- | --------------------------- |
| Haircut sells for | £45                         |
| Costs you         | an hour of a stylist's time |

Here the reward is expensive, and a five-stamp card means giving away one cut in six. That is a real discount, and it should be a longer card or a smaller reward — a free fringe trim, a product discount, half off rather than free.

**The rule of thumb:** if the reward costs you more than about a tenth of what the full card brings in, either lengthen the card or shrink the reward.

## How often do your customers already visit?

This is the part people get wrong. A card should take weeks or a few months to fill, not years.

| Business                | How often people visit    | Stamps that work               |
| ----------------------- | ------------------------- | ------------------------------ |
| Café or coffee shop     | Two or three times a week | 8 to 10                        |
| Bakery or sandwich shop | Once or twice a week      | 7 to 9                         |
| Barber                  | Every three to five weeks | 5 to 6                         |
| Hair salon              | Every six to ten weeks    | 4 to 6                         |
| Beauty or nail salon    | Every three to six weeks  | 5 to 6                         |
| Bike shop or repairs    | Two or three times a year | A stamp card is the wrong tool |

Multiply your typical gap between visits by the number of stamps. If the answer is more than about six months, the card is too long. A barber seen every four weeks will take twenty weeks to finish a five-stamp card — that is already most of a year's relationship.

If the sum comes out at more than a year, a stamp card probably is not the right mechanism for your business. A next-visit offer or a reminder when someone is due works better than a card nobody finishes.

## Why too many stamps quietly kills a card

A card that feels unreachable does not just fail to work. It does something worse: it tells the customer that you are asking for a lot and offering a little. People are good at estimating effort, and a grid of fifteen empty boxes reads as effort.

The ones who do keep going are mostly people who were coming anyway, so you end up discounting your most loyal customers without changing anyone's behaviour. That is the opposite of what the card is for.

## Why too few costs you money

The other failure is less obvious. A three-stamp card gets finished quickly, feels generous, and then stops being interesting. If the reward arrives before the habit forms, you have bought a discount rather than a regular.

There is also a dignity problem: a reward that arrives too easily reads as cheap, and customers discount the business along with it.

## A good default, if you want one

If you sell something under a fiver that people buy often, **start at nine stamps with the tenth free**, and hand the card over with the first stamp already on it. It is a familiar shape, it finishes in a few weeks, and the maths works for almost every café, bakery and takeaway.

If you sell something expensive that people buy rarely, **start at five** and make the reward smaller than a free version of your main service.

## Changing the number later

You will probably get it wrong first time. That is fine, and it is fixable — as long as you are careful with the people already collecting.

- **Honour cards in progress.** If someone started a ten-stamp card, let them finish at ten.
- **Change it for new cards only**, and say so when you hand one over.
- **Never extend a card someone is already filling.** Shortening it is a gift; lengthening it is a broken promise, and it will be remembered.

With a digital card this is easier to manage than with paper, because you can see how many people are mid-card before you change anything. With paper, assume several months of overlap.

## How to tell if your number is right

After three months, look at two things:

1. **How many cards get finished.** If almost nobody reaches the reward, the card is too long.
1. **Whether people visit more often than they used to.** If finishing is easy but nothing has changed about how often people come, the card is too short to be doing any work.

A card that is working looks like this: most people who start one finish it, it takes them a few weeks or months, and they come slightly more often than they did before.

If you are still deciding whether a card is the right tool at all, [the comparison between digital and paper cards](/blog/digital-vs-paper-loyalty-cards) covers what each one can and cannot tell you. And if your real problem is getting people back through the door at all, [there are nine other ways to do it](/blog/how-to-get-more-repeat-customers), most of them free.

## Questions and answers

### Is ten stamps too many for a loyalty card?

Not for a café or takeaway, where someone might visit two or three times a week and finish a card within a month. For a hairdresser or a bike shop, ten visits could take two years, and almost nobody will get there. Match the number to how often people actually come.

### Should the first stamp be free?

It often helps. A card handed over with one stamp already on it is a card that has been started, and people are more likely to continue something already begun than to begin it. It costs you nothing but one stamp's worth of progress.

### What should the reward be worth?

Enough to feel like a thank-you, not so much that it hurts. A useful test is whether the reward costs you less than the profit on the visits it took to earn it. If a nine-stamp card gives away a £3 coffee, you are paying roughly 33p a visit for the loyalty.

### Can I change the number of stamps later?

Yes, but honour the cards people are already filling. Changing from ten stamps to eight for new cards while letting existing ones finish at ten is fine. Quietly moving the finish line further away is how you lose the regulars you were trying to keep.