The forecasts for the 2026 holiday season agree on the headline and then immediately qualify it. Sales will rise by roughly 4 percent or more, the forecasters say — and about half of that rise is prices, not purchases. It is the second half of the sentence that matters for anyone reading the season from a shop counter.
The headline number
The National Retail Federation expects U.S. retail sales in November and December to grow 4.2 percent, to $1.013 trillion (about C$1.4 trillion) — the first holiday season to clear a trillion dollars, up from $972 billion in 2025. NRF’s own economist puts nearly half of that 4.2 percent down to real consumer spending growth, which leaves the rest to higher prices. The federation’s figure is a model, built from consumer spending, disposable income, employment, wages, inflation and past retail sales, and it excludes automobile dealers, gasoline stations and restaurants.
The other forecasters
The other forecasters land in the same place by different roads. Mastercard’s Economics Institute expects spending to grow 5.5 percent between November 1 and December 24, and estimates that about half of that growth will come from higher prices. Bain & Company expects sales above a trillion dollars, up 4.5 percent, and attributes more than half of its nominal growth to inflation. Deloitte, measuring a longer November-to-January window, expects growth of 4.0 to 4.8 percent. These are different windows and different methods, and their percentages are not interchangeable — but the shared admission runs through all of them: strip out prices, and the season grows by roughly 2 percent, or less.
The online numbers
The online numbers are larger and carry the same caveat. Adobe expects U.S. online sales of $275.1 billion for November and December, up 6.7 percent, and expects traffic arriving from AI tools to rise 130 percent over last year — shoppers asking a chatbot to find the gift before they visit a store. Against that, surveys of shoppers themselves are more guarded: 56 percent say the economy will affect their holiday plans, the highest share since 2011, in the synthesis National Jeweler published of this year’s forecasts.
What it means at a jewellery counter
None of these forecasts is about jewellery specifically, and that limit should be kept in view. They measure retail as a whole. But the arithmetic they share applies at a jewellery counter with particular force, because so much of a piece’s price is a material whose price has moved sharply this year. A season can post a higher total while selling fewer pieces, each at a higher ticket — the same ring, in effect, costing more before any question of design or workmanship enters the price.
So the honest reading of a 4 percent season is a flat one. The forecasters expect shoppers to keep spending and to keep prioritising the holidays, and they expect roughly half of the growth in the till to be the price tag rather than the parcel. For a buyer, that makes the old questions the useful ones this December: what the piece is made of, how much metal is actually in it, and what part of its price is the work.
— Tom