ORLANDO, Fla. – What to Know:
• Back-to-school spending is projected to hit an all-time high this year, but families say they’re paying more for the same items – not buying more of them.
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• Even as families cut back elsewhere, one category is holding steady: youth sports.
• One surprising item is taking a chunk out of family budgets – and it has nothing to do with school supplies.
There was a time when back-to-school shopping meant waiting until a week or two before classes started, grabbing the supply list, and making one big trip to the store.
Lately, inflation has had other plans for our money. In effect, it has said, “Hold my beer.”
Paired with slower economic growth, over the past few years prices haven’t just climbed, they’ve contributed to a fundamental change in how families decide what’s worth paying for in the first place, and when to pull the trigger on a purchase.
And that shift didn’t happen quietly.
It happened one budget decision at a time – delaying a purchase here, swapping a brand there. And the numbers explain why: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for educational books and supplies alone jumped 9.4% over the past year, more than triple the overall inflation rate. Daycare and preschool costs rose 5.7%. Back-to-school isn’t just caught up in inflation – in some categories, it’s outpacing it.
A Record Season, Built on Restraint
For 2026, back-to-school shopping is shaping up to be the biggest on record – but the record isn’t being set the way it used to be.
According to the National Retail Federation’s 2026 survey, conducted with Prosper Insights & Analytics, total K-12 spending is projected to reach $43.3 billion, with college household spending crossing $100 billion for the first time.
But that record isn’t being driven by families buying more. It’s being driven by families paying more – and shopping smarter to soften the blow. Nearly half of shoppers, 47%, say they intend to buy only what’s essential this year. Among shoppers, 23% are spreading purchases across several weeks to stay within budget, and 46% are holding out for a better deal. More than half, 54%, say they used June sales events – like Prime Day and similar retailer promotions – to get an early start.
Deloitte’s own 2026 back-to-school research found a similar pattern, with a twist. Among the most disciplined bargain-hunters – those juggling four or more cost-saving tactics at once – spending isn’t down at all. That group is projected to spend 14% more than other shoppers this season, suggesting that for them, “smart shopping” was never about spending less – it’s about spending with purpose.
That same tension – spending more while insisting it’s smarter – shows up across the board.
Sixty-one percent of consumers say they’re seeing higher prices, and 46% say they’re comparison shopping more than they used to, while 41% are turning to discount retailers. Notably, 37% say they’ll cut back in other spending areas specifically to protect what they spend on back-to-school – a preview of a tradeoff that shows up again later in a very different category.
According to KPMG’s 2026 Consumer Pulse Back-to-School survey, families expect to spend an average of $252 per child on school purchases this year, a 6% increase over 2025. Nearly 80% of parents say that increase comes down to paying more for the same items – including big-ticket purchases like laptops – not buying more of them.
The economic squeeze is also showing up well beyond the school supply aisle.
The KPMG data suggest a majority of families expect to spend more this year on groceries (83%), gas and car maintenance (77%), and prescription drugs (52%) than they did at this time last year. Those rising household costs leave less room elsewhere in many family budgets.
Protecting the One Thing: Sports
Despite the tighter math, one category is holding steady: youth sports. KPMG found that 7 in 10 families are planning for sports participation this school year, even as they cut back elsewhere.
Parents point to their kids’ growing interest in sports and the physical health benefits of playing as the top reasons the spending isn’t going away. Outdoor sports make up the largest share of school-related activities, at 43%, with soccer the most popular, followed closely by baseball and softball. About a third of children are also enrolled in some kind of extracurricular training or tutoring – and for most of those families, that means sports coaching.
That commitment is notable given how much more expensive youth sports have become. According to the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative, the average U.S. sports family spent $1,016 on their child’s primary sport in 2024 – a 46% increase since 2019. Families with kids in more than one sport spend an average of $1,500 a year, and nationally, families spend more than $40 billion annually on youth sports. Hockey tops the list as the single most expensive sport, running families more than $2,500 a year.
That resilience may stem from sports participation being woven into a family’s routine, as they weigh tradeoffs elsewhere in the back-to-school budget. It’s not a one-time purchase: it’s cleats that get outgrown, jerseys that get replaced, gear that turns over every season. It’s recurring spending that families are less willing to cut, even as the price of staying in the game keeps climbing.
Trading Restaurant Nights for Home-Cooked Routines
If sports are the category families are protecting, meals are where they’re cutting back.
A recent survey from meal-kit company HelloFresh, conducted with Wakefield Research, found 93% of Americans expect to cook as much or more over the next year as they did the year before – and among those planning to cook even more, 85% point to the economy as a driving factor. Nearly half of respondents, 49%, say they’ve felt guilty getting takeout or delivery instead of cooking at home.
That shift shows up especially sharply around back-to-school season.
The KPMG survey found half of families plan to dine out less often once school resumes, and 48% say they’ll shift to simpler weekday meals at home. Though not exactly the same as the HelloFresh data, both surveys point to the same thing: dine out less, cook at home more.
Also according to KPMG: nearly a third expect to do more batch cooking and advance meal prep, buying more raw ingredients instead of takeout or prepared food. Forty-three percent of parents say home-cooked meals and snacks are their preferred option for their kids during the school week, compared to just 7% who prefer packaged, ready-to-eat food.
The two surveys together point to the same conclusion from different directions: cooking at home isn’t just a back-to-school habit anymore – it’s a year-round budget strategy that happens to intensify once the school bell rings.
A Wellness Wildcard
Well, this came out of nowhere.
There’s one more emerging expense showing up in household budgets – and unlike sports or groceries, it isn’t traditionally associated with back-to-school season: GLP-1 medications.
KPMG found nearly one in three consumers say they’re currently using or considering a GLP-1 drug (like Ozempic, Wegovy, or Trulicity), with adoption concentrated among younger generations – 30% of Millennials and 26% of Gen Z (compared to 21% of Baby Boomers and 33% of Gen X). Most of that interest, 70%, is driven by lifestyle or weight-management goals, and usage skews heavily female, at 75%.
KPMG found that within specific categories, GLP-1 users report spending more on healthy groceries, nutrition products, and even beauty and skincare, alongside pullbacks in less healthy, indulgence categories. That said, the bigger picture looks different: research out of Cornell University, linking survey data to actual household purchase records, found that households cut their overall grocery spending by an average of 5.3% within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, with steeper cuts – more than 8% – among higher-income households. Spending at fast-food restaurants and coffee shops fell by about 8% as well.
Taken together, the two findings aren’t in conflict so much as describing two sides of the same shift: total grocery bills are shrinking as appetites shrink, but within that smaller basket, users are spending more deliberately on health-focused categories – a microcosm of the same tradeoff playing out across the rest of the back-to-school budget.
Last Call: Settling the Tab
Inflation said, “Hold my beer.” Families are saying, “Hold my receipts” and starting to make every dollar answer for itself. That’s what’s really tying sports, groceries, dinner plans, and even a wellness drug together into one back-to-school story.
None of it means families are spending less overall – the record-breaking numbers make that clear. What’s changed is the interrogation. Every purchase now has to explain itself: is this worth protecting, like a soccer season? Worth delaying, like a new laptop? Worth cutting altogether, like a Tuesday night at a restaurant?
Retail experts who track this kind of behavior year over year say the habit isn’t going anywhere – nearly 7 in 10 retail executives now consider these shopping behaviors a structural shift, not a temporary response to inflation. Comparison shopping, sale-timing, and batch-cooking don’t require high prices to keep making sense: they just require a household that’s gotten used to asking the question.
So, inflation may have bought the first round. But families are the ones settling up – and they’ve gotten a lot better at reading the tab before they pay it.