Bank of America's April Consumer Checkpoint is the most retail-relevant macro data drop of the week. Total credit-and-debit card spending per household rose 4.3% year-over-year in March 2026, the strongest annual reading since early 2023. On a seasonally-adjusted basis, spending per household climbed 0.9% month-over-month. Headline number, retail-friendly, looks great.
The story underneath is more complicated, and it explains why retailers reporting Q1 are showing such wide spreads in performance. BofA flags two divergences worth pricing:
Wage growth is rebounding — but unevenly. Bank of America's analysis of payroll deposits shows that after-tax wage growth bounced back in March across all income bands, but the magnitude is sharply skewed. Higher-income households — those above roughly $125,000 in annual household income — saw the biggest gains, driven in part by a strong 2025 bonus cycle. Lower- and middle-income households saw smaller gains, and bonuses for those tiers actually declined year-over-year. That divergence shows up in retail comps as Lululemon and Costco continuing to print mid-single-digit comparable sales while Target, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar struggle to grow traffic.
Tax refunds are doing more lifting than they look. Per the BofA data, 2026 tax refunds are running larger than last year and are skewed toward higher-income filers. Early refund recipients have channeled the money into discretionary retail categories — home improvement, electronics, and clothing — rather than into necessities or travel. That's a temporary tailwind, not a structural one. Refund deposits will run out by mid-summer, and the spending lift will roll off with them.
The macro picture this paints is that the strong March card spending number is a confluence of three forces, only one of which is durable. First, real wage growth at the top quartile of the income distribution. Second, larger and earlier tax refunds. Third, comp-friendly base effects against a soft March 2025. Take the second and third away, and the middle of the income curve is barely treading water.
This is consistent with what every other consumer dataset is saying right now. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index hit a 74-year low in April, the Conference Board's confidence reading dropped in April for the fourth consecutive month, and the LSEG/Ipsos Primary Consumer Sentiment Index for April came in at 50.0, declining for two straight months. Sentiment is collapsing, but the wallet is not, because the top of the income distribution still has room and refund money is flowing.
For retailers planning back-to-school and holiday inventory, the implication is to plan for a bifurcated set of customers and a hard turn in late summer. The high-income shopper is currently the cushion under household spending, and any equity-market correction or labor-market wobble takes that cushion out. The middle- and lower-income shopper is already trading down — the average promotional discount in April was 32.0%, holding well below last year's 35.0%, but a larger share of the merchandise mix is on promotion. The math says retailers are pulling more SKUs into deal in order to drive traffic. That's a margin pressure story, not a strength story.
The next concrete macro check is the April advance retail-sales report from Census, scheduled for release May 14 at 8:30 a.m. ET. March's headline number was strong — $752 billion, up 1.7% — but the weight of gas-station receipts during the Iran-war oil spike inflated it. April's print, with oil now drifting back from $113 toward $97, will be a cleaner read on what real consumer demand looks like with the tax refund lift starting to fade and the wage divergence widening.
The K-shape isn't new. What's new is that retailers can't afford to keep treating it as a tailwind for the top end while ignoring the middle. Almost every retail-relevant dataset right now is telling them to build for two consumers — and to assume the second one is about to push the value-channel comps that defined 2009.