What Americans Spend on Family Occasions · Five Holidays, $133 Billion
Mother's Day is the biggest single gift occasion of the American year at $38.0 billion, up from $34.1 billion, with 84% of adults celebrating and a record $284.25 each. Valentine's Day follows at $29.1 billion — but only 55% of adults mark it, which makes it the narrowest and deepest of the five. Then Father's Day ($27.9B, $226.58 each), Easter ($24.9B, 80% celebrating) and Halloween ($13.5B). The five together come to about $133 billion — still less than back to school on its own.
Why this matters for B2B
The useful question is not which occasion is biggest but where the money lands, and on that the five split hard. Mother's Day sends $7.5B to jewellery and $6.4B to restaurants and outings; Valentine's Day, $7B to jewellery and $6.3B to an evening out. Neither is a wholesaler's market. Halloween is the exception: costumes $4.4B and decorations $4.3B are nearly the whole occasion, and both are goods that ship in cartons and sit on a shelf. Easter behaves the same way on a smaller scale — food $7.5B, candy $3.5B, clothing $3.7B. One more thread runs through three of the five: flowers, at $3.2B for Mother's Day, $3.1B for Valentine's and $2.2B for Easter, about $8.5 billion a year across the calendar. Read alongside the 2026 back-to-school season, four generations in one market and our U.S. market hub.
Source: National Retail Federation consumer surveys conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, 2026 — Valentine's Day (7,791 adults, 2-8 January), Easter (7,845, 2-11 March), Mother's Day (7,877, 1-8 April), Father's Day (7,914, 30 April to 6 May) and Halloween (7,889, 1-9 September), each with a margin of error of ±1.1 points. Back-to-school figures are NRF's 2026 Back-to-School and Back-to-College surveys, shown for scale only. Totals, per-person averages and participation rates are published separately by NRF and are not derived from one another. Chart built by Cube-Age from the published figures; no original infographic was reproduced.