Visualizing Changes in American Household Consumer Spending from 1984 through 2024

In 2024, the average American household “consumer unit” spent $78,535 on everything. That includes things like housing, transportation, food, personal insurance and pensions, healthcare, entertainment, apparel and services, education, cash contributions, alcoholic beverages, personal care products and services, reading materials, tobacco products and smoking supplies, and whatever miscellaneous consumer products there are that don’t fit into any of these categories.

That’s according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditures report for 2024, whose publication was twice delayed until 19 December 2025. The report is compiled as part of the Consumer Expenditure Surveys program, which provides insight into what the average American “consumer unit”, to use the BLS’ term of endearment that roughly corresponds to households, got for all the money they spent in 2024.

That’s useful information, which is why 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 spend on apparel has declined over time, so changes in apparel prices today have a smaller effect on the consumer price index than what they had back in the early 1980s when the survey began.

The Big Picture

Our first chart presents the average annual amount of consumer expenditures by American “consumer unit” households in each of the 41 years from 1984 through 2024.

These figures represent the nominal, or non-inflation adjusted, total average consumer spending in each year. As you can see, recent years have seen the amount the average American household consumer units spend rise sharply because of the high inflation unleashed during this period. Average household consumer unit expenditures grew from $61,334 in 2020 to $78,535 in 2024.

Growth of Consumer Expenditures by Major Categories

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:

This chart verifies spending is up substantially in nearly every major consumer expenditure category, with housing, transportation, and food seeing the most rapid increases from 2021 through 2024.

Changing Shares of Major Categories of Consumer Expenditures Over Time

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.

Our final chart assembles all these categories together to reveal how the overall composition of household consumer unit expenditures has changed from 1984 through 2024. 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.

References

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Consumer Expenditure Survey. Multiyear Tables. [PDF Documents: 1984-1991, 1992-1999, 2000-2005, 2006-2012, 2013-2020. Excel spreadsheet: 2021-2024]. Reference URL: https://www.bls.gov/cex/home.htm. 19 December 2025.