Household Spending YoY

Household Spending YoY is the real (price adjusted) yearly change in average monthly consumption spending per household of 2 or more people in Japan. It comes from FIES (Family Income and Expenditure Survey, a national household survey run by the Statistics Bureau of Japan). The survey covers all Japan with about 9000 sample households across 168 municipalities and excludes groups such as one-person student households and hospital inpatients.

It started in September 1950 and has covered all Japan since July 1962, about 52.70 million households or 94.4 percent of all households. It measures mean (average) spending per household, not total national consumption, retail store sales, or wages.

Households record daily spending each month. The report for households of 2 or more follows at the start of month 2 after the month, roughly 5 to 6 weeks later. It arrives at 8:30 a.m. Japan time with nominal (cash value) and real (price adjusted) change, tables and a seasonally adjusted (season effects removed) series.

There is no routine revision of the headline and no publisher threshold (fixed signal level), while higher real spending means stronger demand. Markets compare the real result with consensus (average analyst forecast) since nominal moves can mislead when prices move.

Spending splits into 10 groups with no fixed weights, and income plus food and energy shifts move the total.

• Food: at home food and eating out ingredients, the largest share of spending.
• Housing, fuel, light and water charges: rents actually paid, repairs, electricity, gas and piped water.
• Furniture and household utensils, clothing and footwear: appliances, furnishings, garments, shoes and related services.
• Medical care: health services, medicines and medical supplies.
• Transportation and communication, education, culture and recreation: cars, gasoline, fares, phone charges, tuition and leisure goods.
• Other consumption expenditures: remittances, personal care, tobacco and the rest.

January 2024 averaged 289467 yen, down 4.0% nominal and down 6.3% real from January 2023, the 11th straight yearly fall. The release of 8 March 2024 put workers' household income that month at 497383 yen, up 0.3% nominal but down 2.1% real. Income and spending can diverge. The release of 6 December 2024 showed the same lesson: 305819 yen, up 1.3% nominal but down 1.3% real.

1. Record: each sample household logs every yen of daily spending in a Family Account Book through the survey month.
2. Weight: municipal coefficients offset sampling ratio gaps, then data for 10 districts and 4 household size groups refine them. They scale results by 1 over 486 so the sample stands for all covered households.
3. Average: weighted household spending divided by weighted household counts gives the all Japan monthly mean.
4. Compare: nominal YoY equals 100 times the change from the same month last year divided by that base. For example, 289467 yen against 300000 yen 1 year earlier gives about down 3.5% nominal.
5. Deflate: the CPI (Consumer Price Index, a standard inflation gauge) removes price change to give real YoY. If prices rose near 2.8% that year, real spending fell about 6.3%.