The Cost of Christmas 2026: What Americans Actually Spend

Every year around the holidays, a number gets passed around: the average American spends some eye-watering amount on Christmas. Usually there is no source attached, and usually it is wrong.

So we went and found the real ones. Below is what the country actually spends on Christmas, pulled from the National Retail Federation, the American Christmas Tree Association, LendingTree, and a few others, with every figure sourced at the bottom. Some of it is reassuring. One part of it is genuinely worth pausing over.

Here is the headline: the average American plans to spend $890.49 on the 2025 season, and for the first time on record, the country as a whole will spend more than $1 trillion.

The $1 trillion Christmas

Start with the big picture. The National Retail Federation projects total US holiday retail sales for November and December will land between $1.01 and $1.02 trillion, the first time that figure has ever crossed a trillion dollars. The year before, in 2024, it was $976.1 billion.

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A trillion is one of those numbers that stops meaning anything, so here is a way to hold it. If you stacked one dollar bill for every dollar Americans spend on the holidays, the stack would reach past the orbit of the International Space Station and keep going for another 68,000 miles. It is a lot of wrapping paper.

The more useful number is the per-person one, because that is the one you can actually compare yourself to.

The average American's $890

The NRF's survey puts planned per-person spending at $890.49 for 2025. That was the second-highest in the survey's 23-year history, a hair under the 2024 record of $901.99. So spending did not jump this year. If anything it dipped slightly. The records being set are national totals, driven by prices and a growing population, not by each person deciding to blow the budget.

Where does that $890 go? The NRF splits it cleanly in two.

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Gifts take the lion's share at $627.93 per person, close to 70 percent of the total. The other $262.56 covers everything else combined: holiday food and candy, decorations, and greeting cards. That is the honest shape of Christmas spending. It is mostly presents, and the tree, the lights, and the ham are splitting what is left over.

For a household, the quick math is worth knowing. A couple both spending the average is looking at roughly $1,781 for the season. A family of four, if everyone spent like the average adult, would be north of $3,500, though kids obviously don't spend $890 of their own, so real family totals land lower and depend entirely on how long the gift list is.

Zooming in on the tree, the lights, and the table

That $263 of non-gift spending is where the decorations live. Here is what the big-ticket items inside it actually run.

The tree. The American Christmas Tree Association pegged the average real tree around $80 and the average artificial tree around $100 in its most recent official figures, with about 77 percent of displaying households now choosing artificial. For the 2025 season, industry press reported both climbing, with artificial trees pushed higher by tariffs on imports. An artificial tree is more upfront, but spread across the seven or eight years people typically keep one, it is the cheaper way to have a tree, which is most of why the artificial share keeps growing. If you are deciding between them, our comparison of Christmas tree types walks through the tradeoffs.

The lights. This is the line item people most overestimate. For a typical home display running about six hours a night through the season, a full LED setup costs only a few dollars in electricity, while the same display in old incandescent bulbs can run anywhere from $15 to $50. The bulb type, not the number of strands, is the real lever. If you want your own exact number, our Christmas light electricity cost calculator does the math from your strands, hours, and local rate.

The dinner. There is no national survey of Christmas dinner cost specifically, which is worth saying plainly rather than inventing a figure. The closest honest proxy is the American Farm Bureau's long-running Thanksgiving dinner survey, which put a classic meal for ten at $55.18 in 2025, roughly $5.52 a head. A Christmas ham or prime rib spread will run somewhat more, but it puts the food line in perspective: for most families, the meal is one of the cheaper parts of the whole holiday. To size yours precisely, our Christmas dinner portion calculator scales quantities to your guest count.

The part worth pausing over

Now the number that is not reassuring.

About 37 percent of Americans took on debt to pay for the 2025 holidays, at an average of $1,223, according to LendingTree's annual survey. For parents of young children it was worse: 48 percent borrowed, at an average of $1,324.

The trouble is not the borrowing itself, it is the terms. Nearly two-thirds of the people who took on holiday debt expected to need at least three months to pay it off, and 40 percent were carrying it on cards charging 20 percent APR or more. A $1,223 balance at 20 percent that takes five or six months to clear quietly adds another $60 to $80 in interest. Christmas, in other words, keeps costing money well into spring for a lot of households.

This is the strongest argument for the least glamorous holiday habit there is, which is setting a number before you shop instead of after. People who spend against a written plan spend meaningfully less than people who spend against a vague sense of "it's Christmas," and they carry far less of it into January. That is the entire reason we built a free Christmas gift budget calculator and a broader decoration budget planner: not to make Christmas smaller, but to keep it from following you into the new year.

For contrast: the most expensive Christmas list in America

If you want the other end of the spectrum, PNC Bank has tracked a wonderfully absurd figure since 1984: the cost of buying every gift in "The Twelve Days of Christmas." For 2025, all the partridges, pear trees, lords, ladies, and gold rings came to $51,476.12, up 4.5 percent from the year before, outpacing regular inflation. Buy each gift the full number of times the song repeats it and you are at $218,542.98.

It is a joke index, but it makes a real point: even a fixed, unchanging shopping list gets more expensive every year. Which is exactly why the average person's $890 keeps setting national records without anyone feeling like they are spending more.

What Christmas actually costs, in one place

Here is the whole picture on a single receipt, per person, for the average American in 2025.

A note on that table so no one is misled: the $890.49 total already includes decorations, so the tree and lights below it are a look inside that budget, not additions on top of it. The dinner figure is explicitly a Thanksgiving proxy, since no Christmas-specific survey exists.

Spending less without a smaller Christmas

The data actually points to a hopeful conclusion. The expensive part of Christmas is gifts, and gifts are the part most responsive to a plan. The tree, the lights, and the meal, the things that make a house feel like the holidays, are collectively the cheap part. You can have a genuinely warm, fully decorated, well-fed Christmas for a fraction of what the gift list costs, which means the room to cut is almost entirely on the side that no one remembers by February anyway.

A few numbers-backed moves:

• Set the gift number first, in writing. It is the single biggest lever, because gifts are 70 percent of the total. Our gift budget calculator turns a total into a sane per-person amount.
• Switch the lights to LED. It is a one-time swap that turns a $30 line item into a $3 one, every year after.
• Buy the tree and decor in the last week of the season if you can wait, when both drop hard, and store them for next year.
• Decide what your decorating budget is before you walk into a store, not while you are standing in the aisle. If you want the full breakdown of what decorating specifically runs, we wrote a detailed guide to the cost of decorating a house for Christmas.

None of that makes Christmas smaller. It just keeps the $890 from turning into $1,223 of debt that follows you into March.

Sources

• National Retail Federation, 2025 holiday spending survey (per-person spending, gift vs. non-gift split) and 2025 holiday sales forecast (total November–December retail sales).
• American Christmas Tree Association, most recent average tree pricing and real-versus-artificial share.
• U.S. holiday lighting cost estimates based on a typical display at roughly six hours per night over the season, LED versus incandescent, at national average electricity rates.
• American Farm Bureau Federation, 2025 Thanksgiving dinner cost survey (used as the closest available proxy for a holiday meal).
• LendingTree, 2025 holiday debt survey.
• PNC Bank, 2025 Christmas Price Index.

Figures reflect the most recently completed holiday season available as of publication. Where a source reports a forecast rather than a final number, we have said so.