American families with school-age children plan to spend a record $43.3 billion getting ready for class this year, according to the National Retail Federation's annual survey — up from $39.4 billion in 2025 and past the previous high of $41.5 billion set in 2023. The average K-12 household budgets $863.86, with electronics leading the receipt at $293 per family. [1]
College pushed into new territory too: a record $103.5 billion, crossing $100 billion for the first time in the survey's history. The K-12 receipt itemizes like a middle-class anxiety inventory — $14.7 billion on electronics, $12.5 billion on clothing, $8.7 billion on shoes, $7.3 billion on supplies — and only half of families plan to do the buying online, down from 55 percent last year, as discount stores claw back trips from Amazon. [1]
By the retail ledger, this is a boom season, and merchants have leaned in — Walmart marked its most popular supplies down to prices not seen since 2019, Kohl's pushed thousands of items under $25, and more than half of shoppers said they timed purchases to summer sale events. [1][3]
The same month produces a different ledger. In Santa Barbara, the local ABC affiliate spent Thursday documenting families in Housing Authority housing relying on a free Tools for School giveaway, parents doing arithmetic in a supply line rather than an aisle. [2] The two scenes are not contradictory; they are the same economy viewed from opposite ends of it.
The survey data itself carries the strain beneath the record. Deloitte's competing forecast found spending flat overall once inflation is counted, with 57 percent of consumers expecting the economy to worsen in the coming months — the highest share since 2020 — and value-hunting now the organizing behavior of the season. Affordability, the NRF's own chief economist conceded when the survey dropped in July, is a top concern for families and retailers alike. [3]
Which is how one August holds both numbers honestly. A record national total can coexist with squeezed households because it sums more families buying more expensive things — laptops are no longer optional, shoes wear out, tariffs and time inflate every line item. The headline reads as abundance. The line outside the gymnasium reads as distribution. America watches itself in both mirrors every back-to-school season, but this year the reflections diverge further than usual. [1][2][3]
Online, the divergence is louder than the retail data. Teachers post their own out-of-pocket totals beside district budget cuts; supply-drive threads circulate with donation links; the glossy haul videos that owned this month three years ago now read as tone-deaf enough to get ratioed on contact. The grievance and mutual aid run through the same feeds, which is perhaps the truest portrait of the season: everyone paying more, some paying gladly, many paying painfully, teachers quietly subsidizing all of it. [3][2]
Classes start in the coming days across most of the country. The bags got handed out in Santa Barbara either way. [2]
-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York