The National Retail Federation's annual holiday forecast, released October 15, puts November and December retail sales at 1.013 trillion dollars, up 4.2 percent from the 972 billion dollars recorded in 2025. It is the first trillion-dollar holiday season in American history, and the second straight year above the trillion-dollar mark. The figure covers core retail only — it excludes automobile dealers, gasoline stations and restaurants — and the Federation defines the holiday season as November 1 through December 31. For small businesses, the headline number matters less than a quieter figure buried in the surveys behind it: shoppers say they will direct 43 percent of their holiday budgets to small businesses this year, which Intuit QuickBooks estimates at a record 118 billion dollars.
Read the forecast carefully before celebrating it. The Federation's chief economist, Mark Mathews, has said that close to half of the expected 4.2 percent nominal growth comes from real consumer spending growth — which means the other half comes from higher prices rather than from shoppers buying more. Bain and Company makes the same point more bluntly: it forecasts total holiday retail growth of 4.5 percent, but says more than half of that nominal growth is price, not volume. Furniture, electronics, and food and beverage are expected to stay essentially flat. The categories with both price and unit growth are general merchandise, clothing and accessories, and e-commerce itself, where Bain expects nonstore sales to grow 9 percent. Deloitte, which measures November through January, projects 1.70 to 1.71 trillion dollars, up 4.0 to 4.8 percent. The season is a record in dollars. In actual goods sold, it is barely bigger than last year.
That is the backdrop against which small businesses are planning the most important six weeks of their year. Intuit QuickBooks' Small Business Holiday Shopping Survey 2026, fielded in August among 1,002 small businesses and 6,000 consumers, found owners strikingly upbeat: 76 percent expect to make more money this holiday season, up from 65 percent last year, and 67 percent had started preparing by September. The preparation has been defensive as well as optimistic. Forty-eight percent of small businesses bought extra inventory ahead of tariffs, and 36 percent of those are restocking at noticeably higher prices. Tariffs are not an abstraction for a shop owner ordering holiday stock. They are a line on the invoice that arrived before the season began.
The calendar gives small businesses one day that belongs to them. Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26, Black Friday on Friday, November 27, Small Business Saturday on Saturday, November 28, and Cyber Monday on Monday, November 30, with Giving Tuesday on December 1. Small Business Saturday, the Saturday after Black Friday, is dedicated to shopping at small and independent businesses, and it lands this year at the exact center of the biggest shopping week of the year. For a neighborhood store, it is the one day when the national conversation is about shopping local rather than shopping cheap.
Hiring tells you how cautious retailers really are. The Federation expects retailers to hire between 325,000 and 375,000 seasonal workers this year, roughly in line with last year's estimated 356,000 jobs, even as the sales forecast sets a record. That gap between a record revenue forecast and flat seasonal hiring is the tell: retailers are planning for a flat-to-modest season operationally, and competing for share rather than riding a rising tide. Shoppers, for their part, are watching their budgets. One survey found 56 percent of consumers plan to cut back on holiday spending, even as they prioritize the holidays themselves. At the same time, 61 percent of shoppers plan to use AI tools this season, up from 47 percent last year, and 71 percent of last year's gift buyers used a digital tool to find ideas.
For a small business owner, the strategy writes itself from those numbers. The money is there, but it is going to the businesses that make themselves easy to find and easy to buy from — online as well as on Main Street, with gift-ready products and prices that respect a careful shopper. The record 118 billion dollars is not a gift. It is a market, and it will go to the shops that show up for it first.
