Visualizing Trends In American Consumer Spending

The results of 2022's Consumer Expenditures surveys have been released and it once again falls to us to visualize its historic trends.

Starting in 1984, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts multiple surveys each year to capture the spending of American "consumer units", the affectionate nickname the BLS' data jocks apply to what is pretty close to, but isn't quite, American households. In addition to describing how much and on what they spend money on, the results of the Consumer Expenditures surveys are used to determine the weighting of various consumer spending categories within the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the most commonly cited measure of inflation for the U.S. economy.

Because the data is used this way, it's important to track how the composition of consumer spending changes over time. For example, because the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) made health insurance much more costly, changes in the cost of health insurance has a bigger effect on consumer price inflation today than they did before the ACA was passed. Meanwhile, the amount that Americans spending on apparel has declined over time, so changes in apparel prices have a smaller effect on the consumer price index than what they had in the 1980s.

Having set that background, our first chart presents the average annual amount of consumer expenditures by American "consumer unit" households for each year from 1984 through 2022.

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Average Annual Total Expenditures per Household Consumer Unit, 1984-2022

These figures represent the nominal, or non-inflation adjusted, total average consumer spending in each year. The next chart breaks out that spending into major expenditure categories, such as housing, transportation, food, life insurance & pension savings & Social Security, health insurance & medical expenses, entertainment, charitable contributions, apparel & other products, and education, to put them in order from highest to lowest:

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Major Categories of Average Annual Expenditures per Household Consumer Unit, 1984-2022

The third chart reveals the trends for these categories, showing how their individual share of total average annual consumer expenditures has been changing since 1984.

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Percent Share of Major Categories of Average Annual Expenditures per Household Consumer Unit, 1984-2022

The final chart puts all these changing trends together. The major categories of consumer spending that have had a falling share of total consumer spending over time are shown in shades of green, those claiming a rising share over time are shown in shades of purple.

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Percent Share of Major Categories of Average Annual Expenditures per Household Consumer Unit, 1984-2022

If you want to know specifically how spending on these major categories of consumer spending have changed since last year, we'll close with the following excerpt from the BLS' press release for 2022's consumer expenditures (boldface emphasis ours).


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