US Retail Sales by Year: 1992–2026

Retail sales measure the dollar value of goods sold by retailers to consumers, published monthly by the US Census Bureau in the advance report that lands roughly two weeks after the month ends. It is the timeliest read on household demand and, because consumption is about two-thirds of GDP, one of the few monthly releases that can move the whole curve.

The series averaged $636 billion a month in 2026, with the latest reading for September 2026 at $652.1 billion. The annual average has risen from $146 billion in 1992 to $636 billion in 2026.

US retail sales by year, annual average in USD billions, 1992–2026

How to read the series

These are nominal dollars, and that matters. Retail sales are not deflated, so in a year when prices rise 3% a 3% sales increase means volumes were flat. The correct comparison is retail sales growth against CPI growth over the same period, which is why this page sits next to our inflation data.

Two long expansions, two shocks. The series compounds steadily from the early 1990s through 2007, breaks sharply in 2008–2009, and recovers on a flatter slope for a decade. The 2020 collapse and rebound is the largest two-year swing in the record: a level shift that never fully reversed, because the stimulus that replaced lost wages was spent through the same retail channel.

Watch the control group, not the headline. The headline includes gasoline, where price moves dominate volume, and autos, which are lumpy. Analysts track the narrower core series that feeds directly into the GDP consumption estimate. A headline beat driven entirely by gasoline receipts tells you about the oil price, not about the consumer.

Frequently asked questions

Source and method

All figures on this page are computed at build time from the Advance Retail Sales: Retail and Food Services series (FRED identifier RSXFS) published by the US Census Bureau and distributed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Annual figures are averages of the underlying observations; growth and inflation rates are year-over-year changes of those annual averages. Where a year is incomplete the figure is labelled YTD.

Data retrieved 2026-10-31. Raw series: FRED — Advance Retail Sales: Retail and Food Services. Chart and table code licensed CC BY 4.0 — reuse freely with attribution to CapitalWire.

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APA

CapitalWire. (2026). US Retail Sales by Year: 1992–2026. Retrieved 2026-10-31, from https://infornkn.com/data/us-retail-sales/

BibTeX

@misc{capitalwireus_retail_sales,
  title  = {US Retail Sales by Year: 1992–2026},
  author = {{CapitalWire}},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Data: US Census Bureau via FRED, series RSXFS},
  url    = {https://infornkn.com/data/us-retail-sales/}
}

HTML link

<a href="https://infornkn.com/data/us-retail-sales/">US Retail Sales by Year: 1992–2026</a> (CapitalWire)

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<p style="font:13px/1.5 -apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',sans-serif;color:#666;margin:6px 0 0">Source: <a href="https://infornkn.com/data/us-retail-sales/" style="color:#c8102e;text-decoration:none">US Retail Sales by Year — CapitalWire</a> (CC BY 4.0)</p>

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