PayPal Referral Code — £10 after a £5 spend

PayPal is the wallet almost everyone in the UK already has, which is why its Invite Friends offer is so effortless to claim: there is no new card to apply for and no spending hurdle to speak of — one £5 checkout and you are done. The two things worth knowing up front are that the £10 you get is store credit rather than cash, and that the current campaign runs against a hard 30 June 2026 deadline.

What you get, and why it is not cash

When the new joiner qualifies, £10 appears for both sides — but as a non-cash reward in the Offers section of the account, not as spendable PayPal balance. You cannot withdraw it, send it to anyone or convert it to a gift card. Instead it applies itself automatically at your next eligible PayPal checkout; if that purchase costs more than £10, your linked card or bank tops up the difference. It is genuinely worth £10 off something you buy — just don't expect money in your bank.

The reward lands about 14 days after your qualifying transaction settles.

How to claim it before the deadline

Open the referral link, sign up for (or into) a personal PayPal account, and within 30 days make one qualifying purchase of £5 or more at a UK merchant that accepts PayPal. That is the entire flow. Because most readers already shop somewhere that takes PayPal, the qualifying step is usually something you were going to do anyway.

The campaign window is 1 February to 30 June 2026, with rewards expiring 30 September 2026. PayPal has run earlier rounds (the previous one ran July–October 2025) and will likely run more, but there is no guarantee, so if the £10 appeals it is worth claiming inside the window.

What counts, and what doesn't

The qualifying purchase must be a completed GBP checkout to a UK merchant. Excluded are charitable donations, non-sterling transactions, top-ups to your own PayPal balance, gift-card purchases and anything on a PayPal Business Debit Mastercard. Refunded, cancelled or reversed transactions don't count either — the payment has to settle.

The Section 75 catch

This is the most important thing to understand about paying by PayPal generally. When you fund a card payment through PayPal, the wallet usually sits between your card issuer and the retailer, which can break the chain that Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act relies on — removing the protection you would normally have on a credit-card purchase between £100 and £30,000. There are exceptions (guest checkout, some Commercial Entity Agreement merchants), and PayPal Buyer Protection plus card chargeback can fill part of the gap, but those are not statutory rights and run on shorter clocks. For anything expensive, pay the retailer directly on a credit card.

Is PayPal regulated?

PayPal's UK entity is directly supervised by the FCA (it moved from Luxembourg oversight in late 2023) and holds permissions as an e-money institution, a consumer-credit firm and a registered cryptoasset business. Your PayPal balance is safeguarded e-money, not an FSCS-protected bank deposit — held in segregated accounts rather than guaranteed up to £85,000. The company reported around 439 million active accounts worldwide in its 2025 results, so reliability of the platform itself is not in question; the protection point is simply about what a wallet balance is.

Is there a PayPal promo code or discount code?

PayPal does issue promotional offers, but they are a different mechanism from this referral and the two are easy to confuse.

The Offers section of a PayPal account carries retailer-specific discounts and cashback deals that PayPal negotiates directly — those appear in the app automatically and are not codes you find and enter. The refer-a-friend reward described on this page is separate: it is invite-based, pays £10 to each side, and lands in that same Offers section as non-cash credit once you complete a £5 GBP checkout.

What people search for	What actually exists
PayPal promo code	Retailer offers appear in-app, not as codes
PayPal discount code	Negotiated by PayPal, applied automatically
PayPal voucher code	The £10 reward is credit, not a voucher
PayPal referral code	The invite link on this page
PayPal £10 code	The refer-a-friend reward, campaign-limited

The reason the distinction matters practically: the referral reward is campaign-limited and closes on 30 June 2026, with rewards expiring 30 September. PayPal's ordinary in-app offers are ongoing and unaffected by that date. So if you are weighing whether to act now, it is the referral that has the deadline, not the discounts you will see in the app afterwards.

What we checked

We verify this against PayPal's own Invite Friends terms and re-check the live campaign monthly, with a daily link check. Because the offer is store credit and time-limited, we are careful to describe exactly what the £10 is and when it expires, rather than implying cash. The code is baked into the link, so there is nothing to type.