What Is Retail Sales?

By Rutger Lokin · Updated 16 October 2026

What is retail sales? It is the monthly count of the money people spent in shops, at car dealers and petrol stations, online and in restaurants. When you want to know whether consumers are still spending, it is one of the first numbers you get.

In the US, the Census Bureau publishes it as the Advance Monthly Sales for Retail and Food Services, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time, about ten working days after the month ends (Census Bureau). The dates are in the Census Bureau’s Economic Briefing Room, and the forecast for each country’s report is on the Economic calendar.

“Advance” means early. The figure comes from a sample of about 4,800 companies, and it carries a margin. In March 2022 sales rose 0.5%, plus or minus 0.5 points, so the Census Bureau could not say they had risen at all (Census Bureau, 14 April 2022).

Why it reaches GDP

The BEA estimates a large part of American spending on goods by having it grow at the same rate as a slice of these retail figures it calls retail control (BEA). Traders call that slice the control group.

So each retail sales report is an early piece of the quarter’s GDP, weeks before the BEA publishes that figure.

One report, several totals

The headline is everything together. The report also gives the total without motor vehicles and parts, without petrol stations, and without both. Car sales are big purchases that swing from month to month, and petrol sales swing with the price of fuel, so those cuts show what the rest of the spending did.

March 2022 shows why you look at them:

everything: +0.5%;
without motor vehicles and parts: +1.1%;
without petrol stations: −0.3%;
without both: +0.2%.

The whole rise sat at the pump. Petrol-station sales were up 8.9% in the month and 37.0% on a year earlier (Census Bureau). People did not start driving 37% more. The price of petrol in the consumer price index rose 18.3% that month alone (BLS). Take the petrol stations out and sales fell.

Money spent, not goods bought

That petrol line points at the report’s biggest blind spot. The figures are adjusted for the season, holidays and trading days, but not for price changes. They count money spent, not the amount of goods people took home.

When prices rise quickly, a flat month can mean people are buying less and paying more for it. Read the report next to CPI to see whether spending grew after inflation.

The month before changes too

Each report revises the month before. In the report for March 2022, February went from +0.3% to +0.8%, a change as large as March’s own rise.

It does not stop there. The Census Bureau revises again in later months and in its annual revisions. In the figures as of October 2026, February 2022 rose 1.1%, and March 2022, first reported as +0.5%, rose 1.9%.

March 2022 moved more than most months, but it is not alone. Take every month from May 2001 to December 2024, leaving out the pandemic swings of 2020, and set the change in the advance report beside the change for the same month in today’s figures, using every edition of the series kept by the St. Louis Fed (ALFRED, retail sales vintages). Over those 272 months the median gap is 0.3 percentage points, while the median advance change itself, up or down, is 0.5%. In 29 of them, about one in nine, today’s figure points the other way: a rise now reads as a fall, or a fall as a rise.

So read the two together. Say this month comes in at +0.3%, with last month revised up by 0.2 points. That is a stronger report than +0.5% with last month revised down by 0.4, even though the headline is lower.

How it moves a currency

Take a US report well above the forecast, with sales outside cars and petrol above it too. Consumers are spending freely, demand keeps pressure on prices, and the Fed has less reason to cut rates. The dollar tends to rise.

Now change two details: flat sales outside cars and petrol, and a sharp downward revision to the month before. Same headline, much weaker report, and the dollar’s first move can fade once traders have read past the top line.

One month is noisy. Weather, holidays and fuel prices all push it around, and a run of strong or weak reports changes a central bank’s view more than any single one. Why central banks also look past food and energy prices is in What Is Core Inflation?