Personal Spending MoM

Personal Spending MoM is the monthly % change in Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), the primary national spending aggregate at about two-thirds of domestic final spending. The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the Commerce statistics agency, publishes it in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs), with history back to 1959. It covers goods and services bought by United States residents, or households plus nonprofit institutions serving households (NPISHs), but not business or government purchases. It also excludes capital gains and price inflation, which the separate PCE price index tracks, so above 0% means spending expanded.

Each value covers one calendar month and appears about 4 weeks later, toward the end of the next month, embargoed until 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time. Dates shift around federal holidays, shutdowns and data shortfalls, with updates posted on the release schedule. Each release arrives with personal income, the PCE price index, outlays and saving, and revises the prior 1 to 2 months. A late summer annual revision rewrites several years back, and reading stays directional, with no target and no buy or sell rule.

Spending splits into durable goods, nondurable goods and services, with services dominant and goods more volatile.

• Durable goods: items lasting at least 3 years, such as vehicles, furnishings and recreational goods, volatile and sensitive to credit conditions.
• Nondurable goods: items lasting less than 3 years, such as food for home use, clothing, gasoline and household supplies.
• Services: non-storable purchases consumed at purchase, such as housing and utilities, health care, transport, food services and insurance, plus nonprofits final consumption.

In the March 2024 reading, published April 26, 2024, current-dollar spending rose $160.9bn, or 0.8%, split almost evenly between services (+$80.6bn) and goods (+$80.3bn). Services gains were led by health care, housing and utilities, while goods gains were led by gasoline, recreational items and food. Real (inflation-adjusted) spending rose only 0.5%, with goods up 1.1% and services up 0.2%, because prices rose 0.3%. The same release revised February growth from $145.5bn to $156.2bn and January from $29.9bn to $20.1bn, showing revisions are routine.

1. Current-dollar detail: build current-dollar spending by category, from census output in benchmark years and from surveys such as monthly retail sales between them. Most goods use the retail-control method (monthly retail sales scaled to an annual survey total), while services use services-survey reports and price data.
2. Seasonal adjustment: remove regular seasonal patterns, using data as provided when already adjusted and the Census X-13 ARIMA software (a seasonal filter) otherwise.
3. Annual rates (SAAR): express levels at seasonally adjusted annual rates (SAAR), meaning the adjusted monthly value multiplied by 12. Dollar changes are differences of these annual-rate values.
4. Real detail: divide each current-dollar component by its matching price index (deflation), then combine parts as a chain-type index (no fixed weights).
5. Monthly % change: divide the SAAR change by the prior SAAR, multiply by 100 from unrounded data; unlike quarterly changes, it is not annualized.
6. Worked example (illustrative): February SAAR $20,112.5bn, March $20,273.4bn; the change is $160.9bn, the MoM rate 100 x 160.9 / 20,112.5, about 0.8%.