How much money do people spend in December?

If you can’t tell it’s the winter holiday season from the festive commercials and lights, you might be able to tell by your dwindling bank account balance. Unsurprisingly, retail spending amps up in this final month of the year. Here’s the data to put it into perspective.

Americans spent an estimated $586.98 billion on retail in December 2023, or about $1,750 per person. For comparison, people spent an estimated $532.85 billion in November that year.

February is usually the lowest sales month of the year, with an average spending of $320 billion. Sales tend to increase incrementally towards the end of the year, rising 4.5% from September to October, 4.7% from October to November, and 18.9% from November to December.
December spending reached a recent peak in 2021 at $593.34 billion. That was up 9.0% compared to 2020 and 1.1% higher than in 2023.

See the data trends

Small businesses and the US economy

Small business development in the US had been declining for 40 years; then the pandemic hit. Since 2020, this section of the private sector has been driving most of the nation’s job growth. But what constitutes “small”? And how many of these businesses are there?

Small businesses (generally defined by the Small Business Administration as an independent business with fewer than 500 employees) account for 99.9% of businesses nationwide.
As of July, the US had 34.8 million small businesses employing 59 million people and driving 61.1% of job growth since 1995. For comparison, the nation had 19,688 large businesses.

Business applications rose from 3.5 million in 2019 to 4.4 million in 2020. But enterprising Americans haven’t stopped there: after tapering slightly in 2022, applications reached a new record, 5.5 million, in 2023. People submitted 4.3 million applications in the first 10 months of 2024.
There’s a subcategory of applications called “high-propensity,” meaning businesses with a high likelihood of hiring employees and having a payroll. As of October 2024, people had submitted 1.4 million of these applications, 75,000 shy of 2023’s year-to-date total.

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Data behind the news

Two kindergarten students were in critical condition after a gunman opened fire at a California school last week. Here is the data on American school shootings.

The peak day for Christmas-decoration-related emergency room visits is usually the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

The economy added 227,000 jobs last month, including 72,300 jobs in the healthcare and social assistance sectors. Eight of the 20 fastest-growing jobs in the US are in healthcare.

It’s Monday, weekly fact quiz day!

Social butterflies

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On that note, a federal appeals court panel has upheld a law that could lead to a ban on TikTok in a few months. While we don’t know what the future holds, we do know you’ll want to see the fun takes on US data we’ve been sharing on TikTok for years.

One last fact

When was the last time you visited your local library?

If you're in Wyoming, the answer is likely more recently than anyone in any other state — Wyoming residents visited libraries 3.82 times per person in 2022. Hawaii had the fewest visits per person that year: 0.60 per person.