A Tim Hortons gift card is the simplest gift on the Canadian calendar: a prepaid card that pays for coffee, donuts and lunch at participating Tim Hortons restaurants, with no expiry date and no fees. Tim Hortons sells it today as the Tims Gift Card, in a physical card for the wallet and a digital card bought online, and the chain’s own Help Centre still uses the older Tim Card name beside the new one. This page covers the whole life of the card from the official sources only: where to buy one, how to check the balance, how to load it into the app, what the limits are, and the one step that decides whether a lost card’s money can be saved.
Gift cards at a glance
- Two forms: a physical card for the wallet, and a digital card bought online
- Where to buy: participating restaurants, authorized retailers in Canada and the US, and online through the Tim Hortons website
- Expiry: none, the card does not expire
- Fees: none, not when adding funds and not when paying
- Adding funds: from $5 at a time in the app
- Highest balance a card can hold: $100
- Balance check: in the app, by phone at 1-866-846-2273, or at the front counter
- Points: 10 Tims Rewards points for every $1 you spend from the card, and none when you buy or reload it
- Lost card rule: a registered balance can be frozen and moved, an unregistered balance cannot be replaced
The physical card
The physical card is the plastic one, sold at participating restaurants and authorized retailers. Tim Hortons describes the card itself as a prepaid, reloadable cash card: you load money onto it, and each purchase comes off the balance until you load more. There is no expiry date on the money and no fee for holding or spending it, so a card found in a drawer two winters from now still spends.
Two details on the back of the card matter. The first is the scratch panel: under the coating sits the card’s PIN, and you need that PIN to register the card online, to check the balance through the card website, and to transfer the balance into the app. Scratch it off yourself when you are ready to use it. If a card’s panel is already scratched, or the card has no PIN at all, do not use it and contact the Guest Care team through timhortons.ca instead, because a revealed PIN is how card balances get stolen.
The second detail is registration, covered in its own section below. An unregistered physical card is cash in plastic form: whoever holds it can spend it, and if it is lost, the money is gone. Registering the card is what ties the balance to you.
The digital gift card
The digital card is the same money in a second form. Gift cards, physical and digital, are sold online through the Tim Hortons website, and the digital one skips the plastic: it is a payment method you hold in the Tim Hortons app. Once a digital card is added to your account, it pays for mobile orders and delivery orders placed through the app, and it can be set as the payment method behind Scan & Pay, so one scan of your Tims Rewards code pays for the order and collects your points at the same time.
Digital and physical balances end up in the same place. You can hold only one gift card on the app, but you can transfer the balances of several cards onto it one after another, so a wallet full of part-used cards becomes one balance. The combined balance still cannot pass $100, which is the most any of these cards can hold at one time.
Buying one
Tim Hortons lists three places to buy, and they are the only channels this page can stand behind. Participating restaurants sell the physical card at the counter. Authorized retailers across Canada and the US stock it as well; the Help Centre does not name the chains, so this page does not either, and a card rack in a grocery or drug store is the thing to look for. Online, both the physical and the digital card are sold through the Tim Hortons website.
On amounts, the honest position is that Tim Hortons does not publish a fixed denomination list in its Help Centre, so this page prints the figures that are official: when you add funds in the app the smallest load is $5, and no card can hold more than $100 at any time. A card bought as a gift is loaded with the amount the buyer chooses at the till or online, inside those limits.
Buy from the official channels and check one thing before you pay: the coating on the PIN panel should be untouched. A panel that has been scratched and covered again is the standard sign of a tampered card, and Tim Hortons’ own fraud advice is to buy at a participating restaurant or from its website and to check that coating first.
Checking the balance
The official Help Centre gives three routes, and which one fits depends on whether the card has been added to the app.
If the card is already on your account, the balance lives in the app:
- Open the Tim Hortons app.
- Select ‘Scan’ from the bottom menu.
- Tap the ‘Payment methods’ icon in the top-right corner of the screen.
- Your balance appears under ‘Saved payment methods’.
If the card has not been added to the app, or you do not use the app at all, the Help Centre lists two routes: call 1-866-TIMCARD (1-866-846-2273), or ask at the front counter of a participating restaurant. There is also a quieter check built into every purchase: when you pay with the card, the updated balance shows on the card reader, and you can ask the team member to print a receipt with the balance on it.
One warning belongs here. Third-party websites offer to check card balances if you type in the card number and PIN. The details on the back of the card are the keys to its money, and the only places Tim Hortons itself sends cardholders are the app, the phone line, the counter, and the card website named in the registration section below. A balance check anywhere else is a risk with no upside.
Using the card
At a restaurant, using the card is a swipe or a scan at the till. The amount comes off the balance, the reader shows what is left, and the rest of the order rules are plain. If the balance does not cover the whole order, it still counts: at the counter the card pays what it can and the remainder goes on cash, Mastercard, Visa, Amex or Discover, where accepted. In the app, a short balance brings a prompt to reload the card there and then, or you can switch the remaining part of the order to another payment method.
In the app, the card pays for mobile orders and for delivery orders placed through the app, once its balance has been transferred in (the steps are in the FAQs below). The card also works across the border: a card bought in Canada spends at participating restaurants in the US and a US card spends in Canada, with the amount converted into the local currency as you pay.
The card and Tims Rewards run on separate tracks that meet when you spend. Buying a gift card earns no points, and reloading one earns no points. Spending from it does: you earn 10 points for every $1 of an eligible order paid from the card, as long as you scan for rewards before paying, or use Scan & Pay and let one scan do both jobs. The Tim Hortons App page walks through the app itself, and the rewards ladder sits on the Deals & Seasonal hub.
Reloading, registration and the limits
The card is reloadable, and there are three ways to put money on it. In the app, open ‘Scan’, tap the ‘Payment methods’ icon, and choose ‘Load Tims Gift Card’ under ‘Add payment methods’, then follow the onscreen steps. Funds for a physical card can be added at a participating restaurant. On the website, select ‘Tims Gift Card’ in the top-right corner, choose the amount and click ‘Reload’.
The limits are few and worth knowing:
- The smallest amount you can add in the app is $5.
- The balance can never go over $100. If your balance is $80, a $40 load will not go through; a $20 load takes you to the cap.
- As a fraud guard, no more than $50 per week can be reloaded to an in-app balance using a single credit card.
Registration is the other half of card care, and it is done on the Tim Card and Tims Gift Card website that the Help Centre links to. A registered card gets three things an unregistered one does not: the balance is protected against loss and theft, the card can be reloaded by credit card, and you can view your recent account activity. Registration also switches on automatic reload on that website: pick an amount and either a schedule, such as $25 once a month, or a floor, such as adding $25 whenever the balance drops to $5 or less. The saved payment method is billed when it triggers, an automatic reload can take up to 48 hours to show in the balance, and automatic reload cannot be managed inside the app.
Lost cards, expiry, fees and cash
This is the section where gift cards from different chains part company, so each line here is the official Tim Hortons position, checked against the Help Centre on the day this page was written.
The card does not expire, and no fees are charged on it: not when funds are added, and not when it pays for an order. A balance can sit unused without shrinking.
A lost or stolen card turns entirely on registration. If the card was registered, call 1-866-TIMCARD (1-866-846-2273) right away, have the card number ready, and be ready to answer questions about recent activity on the account; once that checks out, the remaining balance can be frozen and transferred. If the card was never registered, the remaining balance cannot be replaced, even if the loss is reported. Treat an unregistered card exactly like cash, because that is how it behaves.
Cash back is the narrowest door of the four. The card is not a cash card in that sense: the one opening is where the law in your jurisdiction requires a cash refund once a card’s remaining balance falls to a set amount or below, and where that applies, the cash-out is done at a participating restaurant. Outside that rule, the balance is for spending at Tim Hortons, not for withdrawal.
Plan the gift
For the person receiving the card, the useful companion pages are the Prices page, which shows what a given balance buys across the menu, and Daily Deals, which tracks the public offers running today. The standing rewards story, points ladders included, sits on the Deals & Seasonal hub, and the Tim Hortons App page covers the app the card lives in.