By NRF's count, back-to-school is the second-largest retail moment of the year, and 2026 is on track to set records. The National Retail Federation projects $43.3 billion in K-12 spending, passing the previous high of $41.5 billion set in 2023, with families spending an average of $863.86. College is the bigger story: $103.5 billion in total spend, the first time the category has cleared $100 billion, at $1,437.79 per student.
Those headline numbers look like a healthy season, and they are. But the interesting part of the back-to-school shopping data this year is not how much people spent. It's how differently they spent it.
The season stretched out
Back-to-school used to be a spike. It is now a slope.
NRF found 62% of shoppers had started by early July, down from 67% last year. Deloitte's read is sharper: only 48% of planned spending is expected to land by the end of July, compared with 61% in 2025, with roughly a third of the season's dollars pushed into early August. Among shoppers who hadn't started, 46% said they were waiting for sales, and 47% planned to buy essentials only and restock through the fall.
That last number matters more than it looks. A parent buying "essentials only" in late July is a parent who will be back in September, October, and November for the rest of it. The season hasn't shrunk. It's dissolving into the calendar.
Deal events are now the season's real anchor
If shoppers aren't anchored to August, what are they anchored to? Promotions. More than half of back-to-school shoppers, 54%, shopped June sales events like Prime Day, Walmart Deals, and Target Circle Week for school items. The retail calendar, not the school calendar, is setting the pace.
The channel mix has shifted along with the timing. Half of K-12 shoppers bought online, ahead of department stores at 47% and discount stores at 44%. PwC, via Retail TouchPoints, found in-store shopping fell to 70% of households from 79%, while online marketplaces reached 67%, and 23% planned to shop through social or influencer channels or use AI to find deals.
The most price-sensitive shoppers spend the most
The counterintuitive finding of the year comes from Deloitte. Parents it classifies as "hyper-value seekers," the 31% using four or more cost-saving tactics, plan to spend about 14% more per child than other shoppers.
Research intensity tracks the same way, in per-child terms rather than NRF's per-family average above. Parents using no digital tools planned to spend $381. Parents using search reached $494. Search plus social hit $531. Parents using search, social, and generative AI planned $737, nearly double the non-digital group. Separately, PwC found 73% of families would use AI somewhere in the shopping journey, and 61% of parents planned to let their kids add items directly to online carts.
These parents have money to spend. They just take longer to decide, and they check more places before they do. Deloitte also found 57% of parents expect the economy to worsen over the next six months, the highest reading since 2020, which is the condition under which switching tends to increase.
The visibility problem underneath all of it
Every trend above makes the same thing harder: knowing who actually bought your product.
A brand selling notebooks, snacks, laptops, or dorm bedding in 2026 sold through Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco, and a handful of specialty retailers, across a season that runs from June into the late fall, to a shopper who compared prices in four places first. The transaction data lives with the retailer. What the brand gets back is syndicated category data, weeks later, in aggregate, with no person attached to it.
So the brand knows the season went well. It does not know which of its customers bought the 12-pack instead of the 6-pack, who switched in from a competitor, who bought once in June and never came back, or which of the people who entered its back-to-school giveaway actually purchased anything at all. Those are the questions that determine whether the next campaign works, and they are the questions retail sell-through reports cannot answer.
Closing the loop while the season is still open
The fix is not more modeling. It's asking the shopper.
When a shopper uses Subtotal to connect their Walmart, Amazon, or Target account to a brand's app or website, they provide the brand with verified purchase data in real time: which items were bought, which retailer they were purchased at, and how often. Receipt scanning is the old, high-friction version of this. Account linking only requires a few taps and makes it easy for customers to share their purchases with multiple brands across multiple trips.
In a season that now runs from June into the late fall and spans hundreds of major retailers, that difference compounds. Verified purchase data means loyalty programs and customer promos that reward real buyers instead of bots, and a September remarketing list built from people who actually bought in July.
Back-to-school 2026 is a record season that most brands are watching from the outside. The next one doesn't have to be.
If you're planning how to measure your next retail moment, we're happy to walk you through what account linking looks like in practice.
