Back-to-School Spending 2026: Inside the Record $146.8 Billion Number

Every July I brace for the same headline, and every July it's bigger than the last one. This year National Retail Federation's annual survey put combined back-to-school (K-12) and back-to-college spending at a record $146.8 billion, up from $128.2 billion in 2025. I wanted to actually pull apart what's in that number before I decided whether to be alarmed, because "record" gets attached to this survey almost every year and I don't think that fact alone tells you much.

The record number, and what's inside it

NRF's figure comes from a survey of 7,677 US consumers conducted July 1–8, 2026 with Prosper Insights & Analytics, with a margin of error of about ±1.1 percentage points. It's a self-reported, planned-spending survey — people saying what they expect to spend, not a receipt audit — which matters for how much weight you put on the exact cents.

The headline splits two ways:

• K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade): $43.3 billion total, averaging $863.86 per family, up from $858.07 in 2025.
• College: $103.5 billion total, averaging $1,437.79 per student/family, up from $1,325.85 in 2025 — and the first time this segment has crossed $100 billion.

Three numbers that look alike but aren't

This is the part I think trips people up most when they skim the coverage. There are at least three different "back-to-school number" concepts floating around in the same news cycle, and conflating them changes what you think you should budget:

If you're a parent of two elementary-schoolers budgeting your own household, the $43.3 billion and $146.8 billion totals are essentially irrelevant to you — they're aggregate market numbers useful to retailers and economists, not a household planning figure. The $863.86 per-family average is the closer starting point, and even that needs adjusting for your actual number of kids, their ages, and where you live.

There's a fourth number worth naming too, even though NRF doesn't publish it directly: the median family's spend. Averages built from survey responses skew upward when a subset of families report large one-off purchases — a new laptop, a smartphone upgrade, a full wardrobe replacement for a growing teenager. I'd treat $863.86 as "what a family buying most of the standard categories this year tends to spend," not "what you're falling behind on if you spend less." A family that reuses a backpack, skips new electronics, and buys shoes on sale might reasonably land at half that number and still have everything their kids need.

Where the money actually goes

For K-12 households, NRF's category breakdown shows electronics have overtaken clothing as the single biggest line item:

Electronics ($293.11, about 34% of the average) edged out clothing and accessories ($250.29, about 29%) this year, with shoes ($174.01) and traditional school supplies ($146.45) rounding out the average. That ordering is worth remembering when you're setting your own budget lines — "school supplies" in the classic sense (notebooks, pencils, backpacks) is now the smallest of the four major categories, not the biggest.

College spending skews differently — dorm and apartment furnishings ($194.00 average), food ($153.91), and personal care ($133.34) show up alongside a bigger electronics line ($341.95), reflecting that "back-to-college" spending is really "moving into a new living space" spending for a lot of students, not just school supplies. That's a meaningfully different budgeting problem than K-12: a first-year college student's family is often furnishing an entire room from scratch (bedding, storage, a mini-fridge, a laptop that has to last four years), while a returning K-12 family is usually topping up what already exists. If you're budgeting for both a middle-schooler and a college freshman in the same household this year, don't apply the same mental model to each — the college number is closer to a one-time move-in cost than a recurring annual expense.

Plan your own number

National averages are a starting point, not your budget. Use the planner below to build a household-specific estimate based on how many K-12 kids you have, roughly what grades they're in, and a rough sense of your local cost of living — then compare it against the category split above to sanity-check where you might be over- or under-budgeting.

A couple of honest caveats about that tool: the per-child NRF average ($863.86) is real, sourced data. The grade-level and regional adjustments are not NRF figures — NRF's survey doesn't publish a grade-by-grade breakdown, so I built in a labeled, modest assumption (older kids running higher, due to more electronics and extracurricular gear) rather than presenting an invented statistic as sourced fact.

If you're trying to fit this into a broader monthly plan rather than treating it as a one-off summer expense, my 50/30/20 budgeting breakdown is the framework I'd use to figure out which bucket — needs, wants, or the "extra" money — this actually comes out of.

What about outside the US?

I want to be straight about a limitation here: NRF's survey is US-only, and I don't have an equally rigorous, equally recent survey to cite for the UK, Canada, or Australia. I looked. The closest UK data point I found is a smaller Toluna survey of 500 UK parents, which found roughly half of respondents planning to spend an extra £26–£100 or more per child compared with the prior year — directionally similar (rising costs, inflation pressure on supplies and uniforms) but not a number you can meaningfully compare dollar-for-dollar against NRF's $863.86, given the very different sample size, currency, and survey design.

If you're outside the US, treat this post as a US benchmark and framework — the categories to budget for (electronics, clothing, shoes, supplies) generalize reasonably well, even if the dollar figures don't.

Here's What I'd Actually Do

1. Start from the category breakdown, not the average total. Figure out which of the four buckets — electronics, clothing, shoes, supplies — you actually need to spend on this year. Skipping electronics alone cuts roughly a third off the national average.
2. Use last year's actual receipts if you have them. Your own household's history is a better predictor than a national average built from a different family's kids, region, and school district.
3. Front-load big-ticket electronics purchases into deal windows. NRF's own data shows 62% of shoppers had already started by early July — earlier shopping generally means more access to back-to-school-specific promotions before inventory tightens in August.
4. Separate "back-to-school" from "back-to-college" mentally if you have kids in both. They're different spending profiles — K-12 skews supplies/clothing, college skews furnishing-a-space — and blending your budget for both invites overspending in whichever category you're less used to tracking.
5. Build the recurring categories into your regular budget, not just a summer scramble. Shoes and supplies recur every year; treat them as a predictable annual line item inside your normal budgeting framework, like the 50/30/20 split, rather than a surprise each August.
6. If you're financing any of this, know what you're financing. A rising share of back-to-school purchases run through buy-now-pay-later plans — worth reading my piece on BNPL and credit card debt before you stack multiple "pay in 4" plans across several stores in the same month.

This is educational content, not financial advice. I'm a researcher, not your financial planner, and I don't know your household's specific costs, region, or family size. NRF's figures are survey-based averages, not a guarantee of what any individual family will spend. See the full disclaimer.