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Please consider the BEA’s Personal Income and Outlays report for April 2025.

Reported Details

• Personal income increased $210.1 billion (0.8 percent at a monthly rate) in April
• Disposable personal income (DPI)—personal income less personal current taxes—increased $189.4 billion (0.8 percent)
• Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $47.8 billion (0.2 percent).
• Personal outlays—the sum of PCE, personal interest payments, and personal current transfer payments—increased $48.6 billion in April. 
• Personal saving was $1.12 trillion in April and the personal saving rate—personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income—was 4.9 percent.

Those numbers are interesting but it is real (inflation-adjusted) spending and income that matters.

I have the pertinent charts below, but here are some additional interesting charts from the BEA.

Changes in Monthly Consumer Spending

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Those are nominal, not real expenditures.

Personal Income and Related Measures

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To arrive at real, subtract the PCE price index change from current-dollar (nominal) numbers.

The PCE price index was tame, as widely expected, up only 0.1 percent.

Because the BEA only reports numbers to a single decimal point, there are often rounding errors.

Real DPI rose 0.7 percent. That’s a big number, but we need to dig further because that still does not tell us what we need to know.

Personal Income and Real Personal Income

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Nominal personal income (dashed lines) is on a tear . But it’s real income that feeds GDP.

I highlighted Real PI Minus PCTR because that is the number the NBER uses to determine recessions.

PCTR stands for Personal Current Transfer Receipts, income for which no work was performed. This includes Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing support, and Social Security payments.

Personal Income Six Ways

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Personal Income Details

• PI: +0.84 percent
• DPI: +0.82 percent
• Real PI: +0.72 percent
• Real DPI: +0.74 percent
• Real PI minus PCTR: +0.26 percent
• Real DPI minus PCTR: +0.21 percent

Real personal Income was strong, but much of the growth is PCTR.

The BEA lists Real PI minus PCTR as +0.3 percent. To two decimal places, I calculate +0.26 percent.

Related Posts

May 29, 2025: Significant Revisions to First-Quarter GDP, Income Declines 0.2 Percent

Gross Domestic Income drops, Investment higher, real final sales lower.

May 29, 2025: Corporate Profits Suffer the Largest Drop Since the Fourth Quarter of 2020

Corporate profits fell by $118 billion, a decline of 2.95 percent.

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