Performance differentials among income bands hold steady in Travel, while holiday shopping shows mixed signals.
Since the start of 2025, the health of high-income shoppers has been a beacon of performance for the broader market. This group has fueled a significant amount of consumer spending growth since 2020 and has largely buoyed brand performance in the wake of sustained inflation, tariff uncertainty, and stretched household budgets. What’s more, a pullback in spending from this cohort would have profound implications across industries.
As the holiday shopping and travel season approaches, the stakes are even higher as brands push to finish the year strong. Consumer Edge (CE) US transaction data provides a unique window into the spending behavior across customer cohorts. Leveraging this data, the chart below provides a glimpse into the percentage of subindustries in which the high-income shopper (earning $150k or more annually) and the upper middle-income shopper (earning $100-150k annually) are the fastest growing cohorts across time periods. CE data reveals that high-income shoppers continue to be a sustaining tailwind for performance across nearly 20% of subindustries throughout the early part of Q3.
Trends in Travel and Experiences
On average, high-income consumers – those that make $150,000 or more annually – make up approximately 28% of consumer spend according to CE’s transaction data. Compared to the overall consumer landscape, subindustries in the travel, recreation, and experiences space are particularly reliant on these customers. Spend from these customers makes up nearly 35% of all spend in these subindustries. Such reliance makes these categories especially sensitive to changes in spending patterns among high-income shoppers. CE’s transaction data provides a lens into the stability of these shoppers as well as inflection points in performance differentials between income bands.
Within this space, two subindustries—Airlines and Amusement Parks—have maintained notable outperformance among high-income shoppers. In the Airlines subindustry, performance trends with high-income customers have significantly gapped those making less than $100k per year throughout all of 2025 – even as YoY growth trends have improved in the second half of the year. Comparatively, in Amusement Parks, high-income shoppers consistently lifted overall subindustry performance at an increasingly larger rate as 2025 has progressed.
Conversely, the Cruises subindustry has remained fairly insulated from this effect. While still supported by upper-income spending throughout parts of the year, its 2025 results have leaned more heavily on customers earning $100-150k per year. This shift likely reflects mid-tier consumers finding value in the cost-efficient appeal of cruise vacations amid tighter household budgets.
High-income Consumer Spending Trends: Signals Heading into the Holiday Shopping Season
As the calendar turns towards the end-of-year holiday shopping season trenches, brands are locking in on how to finish the year strong during an already challenging year. For some industries, high-income shoppers have served as a life-line for performance this year, while others have been less reliant on this cohort to drive results.
Full-line Department Stores benefited from strong back-to-school shopping across income bands. This performance was especially prevalent with high-income shopper cohorts. This trend, however, has since faded. In the latest 35-days, these shopper cohorts have returned to their pre-back-to-school trends while performance for shoppers making less than $100k have been more stable heading into the holidays.
Compared to its Full-line counterparts, trends at Off-price Department Stores have been broadly more favorable during 2025. This comparative strength has been even more prevalent in the post-back-to-school shopping period. As students returned back-school, shoppers making less than $100k annual have disproportionately driven results.
Electronics Retail stands out for its pronounced divide in spending behavior. Throughout most of the year, weak trends among high-income consumers have weighed on category results, leading to significant performance gaps versus lower-income segments. Recently, however, spending among high-income shoppers has improved, narrowing these differentials and signaling cautious optimism heading into the holiday season.
Brands and investors can leverage Consumer Edge transaction data to monitor demographic, geographic, and behavioral spending trends, providing a critical edge in understanding the evolving health of the shopper cohorts.
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