NRF Says Mother's Day Will Hit a Record $38 Billion in a Week — and the Mix Tells You Where Discretionary Spending Is Hiding

The National Retail Federation released its annual Mother's Day forecast on Thursday, and the headline number — $38 billion in U.S. consumer spending — is a record by a meaningful margin. It's $4 billion higher than 2025's $34.1 billion total and $2.3 billion higher than the previous record set in 2023.

Per-person spending is projected to hit $284.25, also a record, up from $259 last year. 84% of U.S. adults plan to celebrate, the third consecutive year that participation has held at record levels. Eighty-four percent participation in any U.S. retail holiday is functionally a ceiling — Mother's Day participation now exceeds back-to-school, exceeds Father's Day by nearly twenty points, and is roughly equivalent to Christmas/holiday participation in surveys.

The number that should make every CFO in retail look up: Mother's Day 2026 spending will land bigger than every Halloween, every Father's Day, every Valentine's Day, and every back-to-college season in NRF's tracked history.

Where the money is going (and where it isn't)

The category breakdown explains a lot of what's happening in the broader retail landscape right now:

Jewelry: $7.5 billion, the largest single category — and a record according to a separate NRF data set National Jeweler covered Wednesday. Jewelry spending has now grown for four consecutive Mother's Days. That's the explanation underneath Helzberg, Kay, Zales, and the boutique jewelers in Federal Realty's open-air centers all running normal Q1 traffic in a rough quarter for everything else discretionary.

Special outings (concerts, sporting events, dining, brunch reservations): $6.4 billion, up from $5.2 billion last year. A record one-third of consumers plan to gift experiences this year — the highest share NRF has measured. Restaurant Business reported brunch reservations on OpenTable for May 10 are pacing 12% above 2025 already, and Mother's Day is consistently the single highest-volume restaurant reservation day of the year (ahead of Valentine's Day and Mother's Day in 2024 was the top day in OpenTable's annual ranking).

Electronics: $4.4 billion. Notable — and a category that's been soft in retail more broadly. Mother's Day electronics spending has held up partly because of the iPad/Apple Watch gift category, and partly because beauty-tech (Dyson Airwrap and competitors, smart mirrors, smart skincare devices) has matured into a real Mother's Day SKU set.

Flowers: $3.2 billion. The flower category has now lapped pre-pandemic peaks for three straight years. 1-800-Flowers, ProFlowers, and the broader gifting wholesale ecosystem have benefited disproportionately as gift-givers shift incremental dollars away from greeting cards (down to $1.3 billion) toward more visual social-media-friendly options.

The 33% online / 33% department store / 29% specialty / 26% discount split in NRF's channel data is also worth flagging. Online and department-store gifting are tied for the first time since NRF began tracking the channel split. That's bullish for Saks, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Nordstrom on a relative basis — and bearish for the brick-only specialty and discount channels that don't carry strong gifting assortments.

The macro disconnect (and why it matters)

The disconnect worth noting: this $38 billion forecast is landing in the same week that March PCE inflation showed real disposable income falling for a second consecutive month, consumer sentiment is at a record low, gas is at $4.39 a gallon, and several major retailers (Floor & Decor, Estée Lauder, Royal Caribbean) cut full-year guidance.

How can Mother's Day spending hit a record against that backdrop?

Three explanations, all of them have data behind them:

The K-shaped consumer split is more pronounced than topline retail data suggests. The top 40% of households by income are still spending freely on discretionary categories, with travel, dining, and gifting all tracking ahead of trend. The bottom 40% has cut back on discretionary spending and is concentrated on essentials. Mother's Day is universal-participation, but the dollar volume is heavily weighted to the top half of households, where $284 average spending is achievable.

Mother's Day is gifting, not self-purchase. Gifting holidays are stickier than self-purchase categories because the gifter's social obligation is fixed even when their economic position is softening. Father's Day in June will be a more reliable read on actual consumer-spending health.

Inflation itself lifts the dollar number. A $284 average gift in 2026 buys less than a $259 average gift bought in 2025. NRF doesn't adjust for inflation in these forecasts. The real, inflation-adjusted Mother's Day spending number is up roughly 6%, not the 11% the headline suggests.

What retailers should be doing this week

For the retail-operations and merchandising teams reading this on Sunday: you have eight days, and the three actions that always pay off in the final stretch are the same ones every year. Last-minute gift cards are the highest-margin, fastest-moving Mother's Day SKU — make sure your endcap, your homepage, and your checkout flow are all surfacing them. Same-day delivery and buy-online-pick-up-in-store windows tighten dramatically next Friday — get the customer-service script ready for the inevitable Saturday, May 9 panic. Gift wrapping and gift messaging conversion lifts are typically 10-15% on the order — push the upsell hard in the cart.

The two macro signals to watch this week:

Last-minute purchase share. NRF and Adobe Analytics typically publish data the week after on what percentage of Mother's Day spending happened in the final 72 hours. A higher-than-typical last-minute share would signal consumers waited to see their May paycheck before committing. A lower share signals confidence.

The Mother's Day–to–Father's Day delta. If Mother's Day prints at or above forecast and Father's Day forecast (which NRF will release in early June) shows weakness, the K-shaped story is real — Mother's Day over-indexes to female household decision-makers who hold real estate and equity positions, and Father's Day over-indexes more to broad household disposable income. The gap between the two will be a cleaner consumer-health signal than any individual print.

For now, the U.S. retail-insight team's read is that Mother's Day delivers — and that the gifting and experiential categories are where the discretionary spending is showing up while everything else softens. The next week of brunch reservations, jewelry traffic, and flower deliveries will tell us whether NRF's $38 billion holds.