Consumer spending growth continued to slow in May as lower gas prices have a big impact

Overall spending grew at +1.6% in May, down from +3.0% in April, according to the latest SpendTrend^® from Fiserv report. The slowdown is due to a decrease in spending growth, particularly at Gasoline Stations (-14.4%), where average ticket size (-15.7%) continued its decline.

SpendTrend provides a comprehensive look at patterns of actual consumer spending each month, aggregating U.S. retail sales data across more than four million merchant locations in all major retail verticals, plus services, travel and lodging, and food. 

May 2023 highlights

Spending in Travel (+9.1%), Leisure (+15.8%) and Hotels (-0.1%) has slowed, despite being at a collective pace that exceeds other areas of spending tracked by Fiserv.

Spending growth at Restaurants (+4.2%) continued to outperform Food & Beverage Stores (+0.9%). While foot traffic for both was near the same pace compared to May 2022, Food & Beverage average ticket size was down (-1.4%) while Restaurant average tickets were up (+1.8%).

The rate of decline at retail has slowed when looking year over year, now at (-2.5%), up from (-3.7%) in April. Meanwhile, Building Materials (+1.2%), General Merchandise (+2.1%) and Health and Personal Care Stores (+0.5%) all showed positive growth.

Download the May report to explore spending across nine industry verticals and nine retail subindustries. Key topics:

• Year-over-year spending and transaction growth/decline
• Average ticket size – overall, by sector and by payment type
• Transaction, spending and ticket size growth by payment type – overall and by sector
• Spending growth by region
   

All data is Fiserv proprietary data and includes only actual card-based forms of payment. SpendTrend^® from Fiserv is a macro-economic indicator that reports aggregated year-over-year same store sales activity for card-based payments. SpendTrend does not represent Fiserv financial performance.

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