US retail and food services sales totalled $773.9 billion in August 2026, up 1.2% from July and 6.0% higher than a year earlier, according to Commerce Department data released on 16 September. The gain comfortably beat the 0.8% increase that economists had forecast, extending a run of resilient consumer spending figures that has repeatedly surprised forecasters through the year.
Broad-Based Strength
The so-called control group of sales, which excludes automobiles, petrol, building materials and food services and feeds directly into GDP calculations, surged 1.4%, more than three times the 0.4% rise economists had expected. Sales at auto and parts dealers rose 0.6%, gasoline station sales climbed 3.1% on higher fuel prices, e-commerce sales jumped 2.6% in their largest increase in more than eighteen months, and sales at restaurants and bars rose 1.2%. The breadth of the gains across categories, from discretionary dining to online retail, suggested the strength was not confined to any single sector or driven purely by higher prices.
Prior Month Revised Higher
The Commerce Department also revised its estimate of the June-to-July change, narrowing the previously reported 0.6% decline to a 0.5% decline, suggesting consumer spending held up slightly better over the summer than initially estimated. The upward revision, combined with August’s strong headline figure, suggests the earlier slowdown feared by some economists has not materialised in the way weaker July data had initially suggested.
Why It Matters
Consumer spending accounts for roughly two-thirds of US economic output, so a broad-based beat across categories as varied as e-commerce, dining and fuel signals resilience in household demand even as inflation and interest rates remain elevated. The strength of the control group figure in particular will factor directly into estimates of third-quarter GDP growth, and comes at a moment when the Federal Reserve is weighing its own policy path against exactly this kind of consumer resilience data.
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