vs Last Month
+$4.5B
+0.6% MoM — solid for the cycle.
Monthly Consumer Spending
U.S. Retail Sales
$
725.0
B
+$4.5B
vs. last month (+0.6%)
Past 12 months$695B – $728B
vs Last Year+$25B
YoY (nominal)+3.6%
YoY (real)+0.5%
Retail sales hit a fresh ATH at $725B — +3.6% YoY nominal, +0.5% real after stripping out 3.1% CPI. Consumers are still spending but volumes are barely growing.
Historical trend
Monthly retail + food-services sales.
Source: FRED · RSXFS
The long view: since 1992
From $168B/month to $725B today — 4× growth in 34 years.
ATH $725B · May 2026
COVID trough $416B · Apr 2020
Today $725B
How today stacks up
vs Last Year
+$25B
+3.6% nominal · ~+0.5% real after inflation.
5-Year Average
$685B
Today is $40B above the 5-yr mean.
From COVID Trough
+74%
Up from the April 2020 floor at $416B.
Use this number
Tools for the consumer-driven economy.
About Retail Sales
U.S. Retail Sales measures total receipts at retail stores and food-service establishments. The Census Bureau publishes a monthly headline number plus "ex-auto" and "core" (ex-auto, ex-gas, ex-building-materials) variants. Today's $725.0B monthly headline is roughly $24B per day in retail spending across the U.S. — a 75% increase from a decade ago.
Why it moves markets
Retail sales is the earliest read on consumer spending, which makes up ~68% of U.S. GDP. A strong print fuels equity rallies and bond selloffs (recession off the table); a weak print does the opposite. The "control group" — which strips out the most volatile components — feeds directly into the GDP nowcast and the official BEA estimate of consumer spending in the next GDP release.
Reading today's number
Headline retail sales hit a fresh all-time high of $725B in May 2026, up 3.6% YoY in nominal terms — meaning real (inflation-adjusted) growth is roughly +0.5% YoY after stripping out 3.1% CPI. Consumers continue to spend, just more cautiously than during the 2021–22 boom. The trajectory looks more like "soft landing" than "downturn."
Related trackers
Other live numbers that move with — or against — this one.
Frequently asked
What this number means, and what it doesn't.
No — the headline number is in nominal dollars. To compare year-over-year purchasing power, subtract CPI inflation. Today's +3.6% YoY nominal growth is only +0.5% real, suggesting consumer volumes are barely growing.
Retail sales excluding autos, gas stations, building materials, and food services. This subset feeds directly into the BEA's personal consumption calculation for GDP. The control group is the version Wall Street watches most closely because it's less noisy than the headline.
The Census Bureau releases retail sales around the 15th–17th of each month at 8:30 AM ET, reporting the prior month's data. A preliminary release covers same-store retail; a more detailed release follows with breakdowns.
Yes — "non-store retailers" (the e-commerce category) is now ~17% of total retail sales, up from 4% in 2010. Amazon, eBay, and other online sellers are captured. The category has grown 3× faster than brick-and-mortar over the past decade.
Methodology
Source
Pulled from FRED · RSXFS and cached on the EvvyTools server.
Update schedule
Refreshed automatically by our cron whenever the upstream source publishes a new value. Historical values are not revised after publication.
How we compute
Display value is the raw published number, unrounded. Comparison stats use the closest available reference date. We never edit the underlying data.