Economy

Texas: Home to the Biggest Holiday Spending Budgets in the US

Paul Ausick

Published: December 2, 2015 12:20 pm

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 4:33 pm

The National Retail Federation (NRF) has estimated that the average holiday season shopper will spend $805.65 this year, the most ever and up a little over $3.00 from last year. But the average can be misleading, kind of like the average wealth of the two people in a room when one of them is Bill Gates.

The researchers at WalletHub have taken a more granular view, calculating the holiday budgets for each of 563 U.S. cities based on five metrics: income; age; debt-to-income ratio; monthly income to monthly expenses ratio; and savings to monthly expenses ratio. The firm then uses a proprietary algorithm to crunch the numbers and emerge with a holiday budget for each city.

Interestingly, the median city in WalletHub’s review is San Antonio, Texas, where a typical holiday spending budget is $810, not far from the NRF’s average. But the interesting parts are the top and bottom of the lists.

Of the 10 cities with the highest holiday budgets, seven are located in Texas. No other state has more than one in the top 10:

• Palo Alto, Calif.: $2,886
• Flower Mound, Texas (near Dallas-Fort Worth): $2,624
• Frisco, Texas (also near Dallas-Fort Worth): $2,444
• Sugar Land, Texas (near Houston): $$2,422
• Carmel, Ind. (near Indianapolis): $2,258
• Ellicott City, Md. (near Baltimore): $2,227
• Allen, Texas (near Dallas-Fort Worth): $2,186
• Pearland, Texas (near Houston): $2,162
• The Woodlands, Texas (also near Houston): $2,158
• League City, Texas (also near Houston): $2,112

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Palo Alto, home of Stanford University and arguably the birthplace of Silicon Valley, should be no surprise at the head of the list with residents named Zuckerberg, Page and Brin, among many others.

Why Texas claims seven of the top 10 budget spots indicates, perhaps, that residents of these (mostly) suburban enclaves have a lot of disposable income. After all, no one in Texas needs to buy heavy winter clothes, snow blowers or snow tires. The savings on those items alone probably accounts for half the disposable income. Or not.

In any ranked survey of 563 of anything, there have to be some at the bottom of the pile. Here are the 10 cities with the lowest holiday budgets:

• Kissimmee, Fla.: $209
• Lowell, Mass.: $193
• New Orleans, La.: $190
• Waco, Texas: $142
• Brockton, Mass. (south of Boston): $122
• Kalamazoo, Mich.: $104
• New Bedford, Mass,: $98
• Memphis, Tenn.: $98
• Knoxville, Tenn.: $81
• Albany, Ga. (about 180 miles south of Atlanta): $68

The full list and a full description of WalletHub’s methodology is available here.

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