The Retail Readout · September 2026

The Retail Readout

Monthly U.S. retail sales by category, in the dollars the Census Bureau reports and in dollars that strip inflation back out. Nominal growth tells you what retailers rang up. Real growth tells you whether anyone actually bought more. The gap between them is the price effect. Updated every month after the Census advance release, quarterly for e-commerce.

Latest month: September 2026Latest e-commerce quarter: Q2 2026Updated 2026-10-15

The month in one chart

Year-over-year growth for every category, nominal next to real. When the charcoal bar is much longer than the cyan one, price did the work. When cyan runs ahead of charcoal, prices fell and units grew faster than dollars, which is the normal state of affairs in electronics. Bars that fall below zero are orange. Not seasonally adjusted, so every comparison is against the same month a year earlier.

Window

Sort by

Nominal growth (as reported)Real growth (CPI-adjusted, Jan 2019 dollars)Below zero

Source: U.S. Census MARTS, BLS CPI-U. Real = January 2019 dollars. RetailGeek analysis. Not seasonally adjusted.

Nominal versus real, month by month

The same two growth rates traced over time. The shaded band between the lines is the price effect: how much of each month’s reported growth was inflation rather than volume. Hover any month to read all three numbers.

Series

Range

Nominal YoYReal YoYPrice effect (gap)

Source: U.S. Census MARTS, BLS CPI-U. Real = January 2019 dollars. RetailGeek analysis. Not seasonally adjusted.

Category explorer

Pick a category to see its full history since 2019, either as monthly sales or as year-over-year growth. The grid below shows every category’s growth trend since 2023 at a glance; click a card to load it above.

CategoryView

NominalReal (Jan 2019 dollars)

Source: U.S. Census MARTS, BLS CPI-U. Real = January 2019 dollars. RetailGeek analysis. Not seasonally adjusted.

How much of the growth was price?

Reported growth split into the part that came from selling more (real growth) and the part that came from charging more (price effect). The charcoal tick is the nominal figure the headlines quote. A category can post solid nominal growth while real volume shrinks, and the headline number will never tell you.

Window

Real growth (volume)Price effectVolume fellNominal growth (as reported)

Source: U.S. Census MARTS, BLS CPI-U. Real = January 2019 dollars. RetailGeek analysis. Not seasonally adjusted.

E-commerce, quarter by quarter

Census’s quarterly e-commerce estimate against total retail. E-commerce here means the order was placed online; where it was paid for or picked up does not matter. Stores are simply everything else. Share is the number everyone quotes; the growth chart is the one that explains it. Seasonally adjusted is what Census headlines; switch to unadjusted to see the raw quarters, holiday spike included.

Basis

Range

E-commerce YoYStores (everything else) YoY

How to read this page

Sources

Retail sales: U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MARTS advance and MRTS), 3-digit NAICS, not seasonally adjusted, in millions of dollars. E-commerce: Census Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales. Prices: Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U, not seasonally adjusted. All pulled by API, nothing hand-keyed.

Vintage

The latest month is the Census advance estimate and the month before it is preliminary. Both get revised, sometimes by more than the growth rate itself. Treat the newest bar as a first read, not a final score.

Nominal versus real

Nominal is what Census publishes. Real divides each month’s nominal sales by that category’s CPI index relative to January 2019, so every real dollar is a January 2019 dollar. Real growth is therefore growth in units bought, roughly. Price effect equals nominal growth minus real growth, in percentage points, and lands close to the category’s CPI inflation.

Definitions

Total Retail is NAICS 44000, which already excludes restaurants and bars. Core Retail removes auto dealers (441) and gas stations (447), the two categories most driven by things retailers do not control. Restaurants & Bars (722) is shown alongside retail but is not inside the total. Total Retail and Core Retail real dollars are summed from their deflated components rather than deflated by one index, so the parts add up to the whole.

Seasonal adjustment

Monthly figures are not seasonally adjusted, which is why everything here is year over year and nothing is month over month. The e-commerce section offers both bases; Census does not publish year-to-date on a seasonally adjusted basis, so YTD comparisons there are NSA.

Names

Display names are friendlier than the NAICS titles and slightly looser. “Online & Mail Order” (454) also includes vending, fuel dealers and direct selling and is not a synonym for e-commerce. “Grocery” (445) includes liquor and specialty food stores. “Health & Beauty” (446) is mostly drugstores. “Sporting Goods & Hobby” (451) also carries books and musical instruments.

CPI series used for each category

Each category is deflated by the BLS series that most closely matches what its stores sell. Blends are unweighted averages. No single series is perfect; the notes say where each one is loose.

Built by Jason Goldberg, RetailGeekCompanion to the Retailer Comps TrackerCC BY-NC-SA 4.0