Every month, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau releases its first calculation of the previous month’s retail sales. At Retail Dive, we report on the results for core retail segments, (minus food, auto and fuel), using year-over-year comparisons.
From new store concepts to accessibility efforts, retailers are constantly shifting their approach to better cater to shopper needs.
YoY sales performance by sector
Monthly retail sales
How key retail sales fared year over year
Total sales+4%General merchandise+5%Furniture & home+5%Non-store+4%Clothing & accessories+4%Electronics & appliances+0%Sporting goods, hobby, bookstores-4%
Retail Dive calculates “total retail sales” of core segments, as well as what the Commerce Department calls “Nonstore retailers.” That includes e-commerce, mail order and infomercials, but also revenue from subsectors not generally considered traditional retail, including vending machines, home delivery (including newspapers and home heating oil), door-to-door solicitation, in-home demonstrations and portable stalls like non-food street vendors. Year-over-year comparisons use the most recent revisions to estimates; year-to-date numbers use only advanced numbers.
- January 2025
Total monthly sales: $234.88B
Retail sales in the segments tracked by Retail Dive rose 3.9% year over year in January, according to figures released Friday by the U.S. Department of Commerce. E-commerce rose 3.8%.
“January is usually a slow time for retailers — and these figures are seasonally adjusted — but relative to last year, January 2025 results are pretty impressive,” Bankrate Senior Industry Analyst Ted Rossman said in emailed comments Friday.
Given the cold and snow across much of the country last month, January’s sales were “especially impressive,” according to Rossman. The cold weather also helped propel sales across apparel as consumers purchased outerwear and warm garments, according to GlobalData Managing Director Neil Saunders.
The National Retail Federation, which uses credit card data for its monthly retail sales calculations, earlier this week found that January retail sales — excluding restaurants, fuel and autos — increased 5.7% year over year. However, once inflation is stripped out, sales volumes increased by 1.6% in January, according to GlobalData.
January also marked the start of a new administration and with that came fears of tariffs for consumers, analysts said. That pushed some consumers to pull forward purchases to avoid price increases, including in the auto and home furnishings sectors, Saunders said in emailed comments. “All that said, the overall impact, while helpful, was marginal in growth terms,” he added.
Sporting goods saw sales slide 4.3% in January compared to a year ago. But other sectors Retail Dive covers experienced gains: home goods and general store sales each rose 5.2%, department stores rose 1.4% and electronics inched up 0.2%.
The growth in home goods follows a year of declining sales in the sector, and while some of that is a normalization in spending, “there was a greater willingness to refresh homes with new decor once the holidays had ended,” Saunders said.
Apparel rose 3.6% last month, benefiting from consumers taking advantage of post-holiday promotions. Volume sales in apparel grew about 3% year over year, according to GlobalData.
“Retail will be highly satisfied with the start to the year. The challenge will be to keep this kind of momentum going,” Saunders said. “There are a lot of potential headwinds from sticky inflation, high debt levels, and a suppressed housing market. The uncertainty of tariffs and their impact on prices adds another changeable dimension. Factoring all of this in, we think that growth may become more subdued as the year progresses, but that retail will remain in positive territory.”
Methodology
The federal government’s retail sales reports are highly anticipated each month. This tracker is based on the government’s “unadjusted” numbers, which track with how retailers themselves report sales.
The Commerce Department revises its numbers a couple of times after they are first published. To accommodate that, and to make the data more meaningful, Retail Dive has adjusted the year-over-year comparisons in each segment to use the government’s most recently revised year-ago number.
For the sector graph, that means that a decline or rise each month reflects the change from the most updated figure in the year-ago period to the latest (or advance) number in the current year. Past data points are revised to reflect this, and moving forward this is how the data will be calculated. In most cases, the numbers change only slightly if at all, but when the government’s revisions are major, it can make a difference. The year-to-date chart is based on “advance” numbers.