The fastest pulse of consumption, which is two-thirds of the US economy.
The short answer
- What is the Retail Sales indicator (Retail Sales)?
- Retail sales: total store sales, monthly.
- When do Retail Sales get it wrong?
- Nominal, not real: inflation lifts it without any actual growth. See it on market data now in the "Macro map". Open the macro map →
Indicator limit
Nominal, not real: inflation lifts it without any actual growth.
Read it with
Annual inflation: sales are nominal, so subtract inflation to read them as real growth.
Answers: how is the economy doing?
What it measures
Retail sales measure the total consumers spend each month at retail stores and restaurants. They matter because of what they represent: consumption is about two thirds of the US economy, so the consumer's health is, in practice, the economy's health.
The control group: the number to read
The headline number swings with cars, fuel and building materials, items that are volatile for their own reasons. That is why professionals read the control group, which excludes them and feeds directly into the GDP calculation. A weak headline with a strong control group is a positive reading, not a negative one.
Nominal, not real
It is published in nominal terms, not adjusted for inflation. So a 3% annual rise with 3% inflation means a flat volume of purchases: people pay more, they do not buy more. Ignoring this makes high-inflation data look like a consumer boom when it is not.
Its sector reading
Its category breakdown is a sector map. Spending shifting from goods to services, or from discretionary to essentials (a trade-down), says more about the consumer's condition than the total, and informs sector positioning ideas.
Hypothetical example
A month where nominal sales rise half a point while monthly inflation rises four tenths: real growth is a tenth. The breakdown shows groceries up and furniture down. A consumer tightening their belt is not thriving.
Read it with
Read it with inflation to turn it into a real figure. Add consumer confidence, which leads it as a mood gauge, and consumer credit data, which shows whether spending comes from income or from debt.
Where to see it on the platform
The macro dashboard includes it in the growth reading, and the calendar schedules its monthly release.
Seasonality and adjustment
The data is published seasonally adjusted, because monthly spending follows a calendar, not an economy: November and December swell with the holidays and January shrinks after them. Seasonal adjustment removes the expected pattern so only the surprise remains. But it errs when buying habits themselves shift, such as part of the holiday season moving into October because of early promotions. So read a single month with care in peak seasons, and rely on the year-over-year comparison (a month against the same month a year earlier) when the adjustment is in doubt.
