How Much Do Canadians Spend on Christmas? (2026)

The figure you’ll read in every holiday-spending story this December was collected in late summer. Leger surveyed 2,500 Canadians between August 21 and September 4, 2026, for the Retail Council of Canada (opens in a new tab), asking what they planned to spend on holiday shopping. The answer, $911, went out on October 20 and will be quoted straight through to Boxing Day.

That’s not a criticism of the survey. It’s worth knowing what the number is, though: a plan, made more than three months early, by people who hadn’t started shopping.

Two figures circulate, they measure different things, and neither one is a receipt.

How much do Canadians spend on Christmas?

Canadians budget about $911 on holiday shopping, mostly gifts, and about $1,487 on the holidays overall, travel and entertainment included. Both figures come from pre-season surveys of what people intend to spend. The only measured number, taken from actual credit cards, is Equifax Canada’s: average December card spending of $2,297, adjusted for inflation.

The three aren’t alternatives to each other, and stacking them side by side is the fastest way to see why articles on this topic contradict one another. One is a shopping budget, mostly gifts. One is a whole-season budget. One is a month of card activity that includes groceries, gas and the hydro bill along with the presents.

Why do the numbers disagree so much?

Three reasons, and none of them is that somebody got the arithmetic wrong. The surveys measure different baskets, they’re taken months before the spending happens, and no government agency counts Christmas at all.

The baskets aren’t the same

PwC Canada’s 2026 outlook (opens in a new tab) puts average planned spending at $1,487, which is an 11% drop from the year before and covers gifts, travel and entertainment. The Retail Council’s $911 is mostly gifts. Presents for other people make up 86% of it, and the rest is what shoppers plan to buy for themselves. They’re separate surveys with separate samples too, so the difference between them isn’t a clean travel-and-entertainment figure, and neither one contradicts the other.

The surveys run before Christmas shopping starts

The Retail Council survey ran in late August and early September. PwC’s ran in July and early August. People are good at describing the version of themselves who shops carefully in November, and less good at predicting the Sunday in December when three gifts are still missing.

Nobody official counts Christmas

Statistics Canada measures retail trade, not celebrations. Its December 2025 release (opens in a new tab) puts total Canadian retail sales at $70.0 billion for the month, down 0.4%, and there’s no way to separate a nephew’s present from a tank of gas inside that. So every Christmas-spending number you’ll ever read comes from a private survey. That’s why they vary, and why treating any of them as an official statistic overstates what they can tell you.

How much do people spend by province?

Shopping budgets vary more across Canada than the national average suggests. Albertans planned the highest at $1,184 and Quebec the lowest at $664, a gap of $520. Ontario and British Columbia planned the deepest cuts, at 13% and 12%.

One wrinkle worth noticing: on total holiday spending, Alberta drops from the top of the list to the bottom. PwC groups it with Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and that region plans the least at $1,261, against $1,639 in British Columbia, the highest. Albertans budget generously for presents and modestly for everything else around them.

Quebec’s smaller number isn’t a smaller commitment either. Its budget is up 7% from last year, and only Manitoba and Saskatchewan also plan to spend more.

What did Canadians actually spend last Christmas?

Close to what they spent the year before. Before the 2025 season, Canadians told PwC (opens in a new tab) they’d cut holiday spending by 10%. Equifax Canada’s Q4 2025 data (opens in a new tab), which tracks what actually got charged, shows inflation-adjusted credit card spending in December falling 0.7% year over year to $2,297.

Those two figures cover different things, so read them as direction rather than a precise gap. Even so, the direction is the useful part: the intended cut was more than ten times the measured one.

Balances still hit a record

Canadian credit card balances reached $131 billion in the fourth quarter, up 4.04%, an all-time high. Careful shopping and a rising balance turn out to be compatible, because prices moved too. Equifax’s Rebecca Oakes described Canadians as responding “in a credit-responsible way, with less holiday spend placed on credit cards this year.” The record balance is the other half of the same quarter.

The pullback wasn’t evenly shared

Consumers aged 26 to 35 cut their holiday spending 2.0%. Everyone 46 and older increased theirs. Regionally the sharpest pullbacks came from the Northwest Territories at 4.1%, Alberta at 3.0% and British Columbia at 2.2%.

What does the January bill look like?

Tighter than the shopping suggests. A Liaison Strategies national poll (opens in a new tab) of 1,000 Canadians in early January 2026 found only 19% were not at all concerned about paying their January credit card statement in full. Just under half, 45%, called credit card debt a major threat to the Canadian economy.

The number that matters most for planning is a different one: 11% of Canadians said they’d be completely unable to cover an unexpected $500 expense. December doesn’t create that, but it’s the month most likely to expose it, which is the argument for building an emergency fund separately from the holiday money rather than out of the same pot.

Missed payments followed the season. Equifax recorded 90-day delinquency on non-mortgage debt rising from 1.64% to 1.73%, with consumers aged 26 to 35 posting the highest rate in the country at 2.55%. The one bit of good news: the spending pullback meant roughly 30,000 fewer people missed a January payment than a year earlier.

How much should you set aside each month?

Take the number you’re aiming at and divide it by the months left before mid-December, when most shopping is done. Starting in August, the national $911 shopping budget works out to about $228 a month. Leave it to November and the same budget lands in one paycheque.

Pick the target before the month

The column you use matters less than choosing one. A holiday budget set in August is a decision; a holiday budget discovered in January is a credit card statement. If you’ve never tracked what December costs you, start from last year’s card statements rather than from a national average, because your own December is the only one you have to pay for. Add the people you tip in December too. Holiday tips for a cleaner, a hairstylist and the daycare can add a few hundred dollars on top of the gifts.

Move it out of chequing

An automatic transfer on payday into a separate savings account does most of the work, and it’s the same mechanic behind any budget that survives contact with real life. Money that stays in chequing gets spent on ordinary things without a decision ever being made.

Debt first, if you have any

If you’re carrying a balance at 20%, saving alongside it costs you more than it earns. Our guide to paying off debt or saving first sets the order, and the short version is that a small buffer comes first, then the debt, then the holiday fund.

Making next December’s fund more interesting

The hard part of a four-month savings run is the middle. In September and October you’re moving money you can’t spend toward a month that hasn’t arrived yet, with nothing to show for it but a slightly larger number.

Lodavo is a free Canadian app that puts something on top of that stretch. Connect the bank account you already use, read-only, and every $25 of your balance earns you a free ticket in a weekly cash draw, with a top prize of $10,000 and a guaranteed prize of at least $100 going to a user every week. The more you save, the more chances you get. Nothing is staked and no ticket is ever bought, so a week where you don’t win is still a week where your December fund grew.

Start the holiday fund before the holidays

The gap between $911 and a January credit card statement is mostly four months of not deciding. Pick a number, divide it by the months you have left, and move it somewhere you won’t touch by accident.

If much of your shopping will ship to your door, it’s also worth knowing who pays when a package is stolen from your porch before the boxes start arriving.

Ready to make that stretch pay something? Lodavo is free on the Apple App Store (opens in a new tab) and the Google Play Store (opens in a new tab), and every $25 you have saved is a ticket in the weekly draw.

Terms and conditions apply. No purchase necessary (alternate method of entry available). Skill-testing question required. Open to legal residents of Canada who are the age of majority. Odds depend on the number of eligible entries received. Full rules and odds at our contest rules.