Families will spend more on back-to-school shopping this year, and it isn’t because money got any easier to find. Parents are paying closer attention to every dollar than they have in years. They’re still making exactly one exception, and they know precisely why.
The first-day-of-school outfit is that one exception, the purchase almost no parent will skip. It’s the photo every family takes, the one that ends up in group chats and photo albums for years after. Kids know exactly what they want to be wearing in it, and plenty of parents know better than to argue. A worn backpack from last year never comes up in conversation, but a new outfit almost always does.
Total spending on kindergarten through 12th grade students is on pace to set a new record this year, reaching $43.3 billion, up from $39.4 billion in 2025. The typical family plans to spend $863.86 total, a slight increase over last year. That is happening in a season when plenty of parents say they are being more careful with money, not less.
Clothing spending keeps climbing this year
Clothing and accessories are one of the few categories where parents plan to spend meaningfully more this year. Families expect to lay out around $323 on their child’s wardrobe, a 22% jump from last year, even as that same category is the one parents say they’d cut if money gets tight. Parents are not spending more on clothing because they have more room in the budget. They are protecting it while trimming elsewhere, which says less about fashion and more about what that clothing is actually for this time of year.
Kids still call the shots on splurges
For many families, one component drives everything else: 45% of parents say their child has a specific must-have item for back-to-school, and 57% say that child influences them to splurge on it. That influence does not show up evenly across a shopping list. It focuses on the items a child will actually wear in front of classmates and cameras, which helps explain why the first-day outfit survives budget cuts that hit school supplies, backpacks and lunch gear without much resistance at all.
Tech budgets shrink as clothing spending grows
Back-to-school shoppers plan to cut technology spending 16% this year, down to about $417 per child, as they put off replacing phones, tablets and laptops that still work fine. A laptop can wait until next semester, but a first-day outfit can’t wait until next week. That difference in urgency, not just visibility, is exactly what makes tech the easiest category to cut and clothing the hardest.
Digital shopping tools quietly raise totals
Parents who lean on more tools while shopping tend to spend more overall, sometimes by a wide margin. Families who shop without search engines or social media plan to spend about $381 total, while those using search, social media and AI tools together plan to spend closer to $737 on average. That gap does not come from any single big-ticket purchase; it comes from more comparison shopping, more product discovery and, ultimately, more items ending up in the cart.
Plenty of the same parents driving totals higher also say they expect the economy to get worse in the next six months, the highest level of concern recorded since 2020. Record spending and real financial worry are showing up in the same season, which is less of a contradiction than it looks. Families are not spending more because they feel flush; they are spending more on the few things that matter to them and pulling back everywhere else.
Family budgets will probably keep bending this way for years, not just this one. As parents keep tightening spending item by item, the purchases that survive say more about what a household values than what it can technically afford. The backpack blends into the background, but first-day photo does not.
Jennifer Allen is a retired professional chef and long-time writer. Her work appears in dozens of publications, including MSN, Yahoo, The Washington Post and The Seattle Times. These days, she’s busy in the kitchen developing recipes and traveling the world, and you can find all her best creations at Cook What You Love.