When you refund a game you purchased with a Xbox gift card, does it give you the balance back?

Hi, I hope you're doing great out there. I am an Independent advisor and I am here to help you in regard to your concern.

Once the refund has been approved and already stated as "refunded" on your order history (https://account.microsoft.com/billing/orders), it will now depend on your bank on when they will credit back the money but it usually takes 5-7 business days if you used your card from back or PayPal.

This means that if you use your Microsoft balance in purchasing the refunded item, it should be credited back to your Microsoft balance as well.

When you get refunded, it gets refunded to the choice of payment you made. So if was a card payment it would be refunded back on the card. If it was gift card then the refund goes back to Microsoft Account balance. For you, then the refund should go back on the Verizon billing.

Once you put the xbox gift card onto your account and its in your Microsoft account balance you can then go to microsoftstore.com and sign in with the account that has the gift card money on it and purchase a xbox live digital subscription card and when
going through the checkout process it will give you the option to use the Microsoft account balance to make the purchase. it will then give you a new 25 character code to put in that will give you the amount of time that you purchased on a live subscription.

It would depend. A refunded Xbox gift card purchase will go back into your Microsoft Account via your 'Microsoft Account Balance...' since that's how Xbox gift card money is accredited to your account.

There is a strong chance that if you were using another type of pre-paid gift card, such as a pre-paid Visa Debit gift card... then you would probably see it go back to the gift card. You would most likely want to get that gift card registered online through
the method you would use to check the balance that should be listed on the back of the card. Typically those Visa gift cards have some sort of account you can make to register them to, so that would need to get squared away first before you went through with
the refund.

A lot of times when you purchase a game like that from GameStop what they actually do is give you the amount on a gift card that you would put into your account that would go into your MS/Xbox account balance and then you would just need to purchase the
game with that gift card money.

have you checked your MS/Xbox account balance to see if this is what possibly happened?