Consumer Spending Intent Splits Sharply by Income This Holiday

American shoppers are opening their wallets again — some of them. Alvarez & Marsal's Consumer and Retail Group released its Fall 2026 Consumer Sentiment Survey on November 12, 2026, drawn from a nationally representative survey of more than 2,000 adults. Overall spending intent reached +4 percent net, its highest level since fall 2023. Read one line further, and the recovery belongs mostly to one income group: the firm says higher-income households are carrying nearly all of the momentum.

The engine is earnings confidence, and only at the top. Higher-income households' expectations of earning more jumped 10 points, to 63 percent, and their intent to spend more rose 7 points, to 25 percent. Lower-income households show a different mechanism entirely. Their intent to save more fell 6 points, to 22 percent — meaning their spending intent is rising not because they expect more income, but because they're saving less to fund it. Alvarez & Marsal calls the result the widest savings gap between income groups since fall 2023, and its managing director Chad Lusk summarized the pattern as stronger earners turning earnings expectations into spending while everyone else stretches.

The holiday numbers make the split concrete. Total holiday spending intent has turned negative, at -14 percent net, down from roughly -3 percent last fall. Higher-income households plan to spend more, at +18 percent net, led by holiday meals and treats, travel and gifts for others. Lower-income households plan to cut back in every holiday category, at -26 percent net. A retailer reading only the headline +4 percent would stock for a recovery. A retailer reading the holiday table would stock for two different Christmases at once.

Where the money is going is just as uneven. Grocery leads the recovery, with net-more spending intent doubling to +14 percent — food is the category households protect first, and its rise says as much about prices as about confidence. Health sits at the top of consumers' stated priorities in the survey, and a growing share of shoppers are letting software help them decide: 43 percent of consumers now let AI influence a final purchase decision at least sometimes, up from 35 percent in the spring. That's a channel shift arriving inside a single year, and it affects which products get found before it affects which get bought.

For a household deciding its own holiday budget, the survey's useful lesson isn't the averages. It's the mechanism. Spending funded by expected income behaves differently from spending funded by saving less: the first can continue into January, the second ends when the buffer does. If your plan this season depends on drawing down savings while prices stay high, you're in the survey's fragile group, whatever the headline says — and the time to set the ceiling is before the grocery and gift spending starts, not after.

Alvarez & Marsal runs this survey twice a year, so the spring edition will show whether the gap closed or hardened. For now, fall 2026 reads as a recovery with a dividing line through it: confidence at the top, arithmetic at the bottom, and a holiday season that will feel prosperous and tight at the same time, depending on which side of the line a family shops from.