The list looks harmless. A few notebooks, some pencils, a backpack. Then you add the shoes that no longer fit, the clothes for a kid who grew over the summer, maybe a laptop or a calculator the class requires, and the total stops looking harmless fast.
Families with children in kindergarten through 12th grade plan to spend an average of about $864 on back-to-school shopping this year, according to the National Retail Federation, up slightly from $858 last year. Nationally, that adds up to a record $43.3 billion, more than the country spent even at the height of the post-pandemic surge. For a household with one child that is a real line item. For a household with three, it is a small monthly paycheck, spent in a couple of weeks.
Where the money actually goes
The phrase back-to-school shopping makes people picture a supply list, but supplies are actually the smallest slice of the bill. Of that roughly $864, families expect to spend about $293 on electronics, $250 on clothing and accessories, $174 on shoes, and only $146 on actual school supplies. Add the clothes and shoes together and they run more than $420, nearly three times the pencils-and-paper number that the season is named after.
That mix is why the costs are hard to trim. A parent can reuse last year's binders, but a growing child still needs shoes that fit and pants that reach the ankle, and a school that assigns work on a device still expects the device to exist. The genuinely optional spending is a smaller share of the total than it feels like when you are standing in the store.
Why it lands as a burden, not just a bill
Two things turn a predictable expense into a burden. The first is timing. The whole cost hits in a narrow window at the end of summer, often on top of childcare, summer activities, and the general expense of kids being home. There is no spreading it across the year. The second is that a lot of families are already stretched. In a Deloitte survey this year, 57% of parents said they expect the economy to get worse within six months, the highest that reading has been since 2020.
The strain shows up in how people are paying. In a 2026 survey of more than a thousand parents, 60% said they are already carrying school-related debt, and 27% owed $1,000 or more before this fall's shopping even started. A new study this year found that 45% of parents are preparing to take on debt over school supplies, up from about a third in 2024, and more than half said they plan to cut back on necessities like groceries to make sure their kids have what they need. Those are not luxuries being sacrificed. They are trade-offs between one basic thing and another.
And the weight is not evenly distributed. For parents earning under $40,000 a year, the survey found that the essentials, supplies, clothes, and getting to school, are the top sources of stress, not the extras. A flat $864 average hides a wide spread: comfortable for some households, and a genuine problem for the ones with the least room. The same gap shows up in schools themselves, where the buildings serving the most low-income students are also the ones where teachers most often spend their own money to fill in what families cannot. We have written before about the pressure that seeps into all of this, from viral back-to-school hauls that reset what kids think is normal, to the question of who is supposed to teach kids about money in the first place.
What actually helps
There is no trick that makes $864 disappear, but a few things take real money off the top. Many states run a back-to-school sales-tax holiday in late summer, a weekend when clothes, shoes, and supplies under a certain price are tax-free, which is worth timing a big shop around if your state has one. Clothes and shoes are the categories where buying secondhand or a size up on clearance saves the most, since they are the largest spend. Schools, PTAs, churches, and nonprofits run supply drives that many families qualify for and never ask about.
It is also worth checking the fine print of the burden itself. Ask the school what it genuinely requires before buying everything on a generic big-box list, since the classroom version is often shorter. If money is tight, ask about fee waivers and about free or reduced-price meals, which cover a cost that runs all year and often unlocks other help. None of that erases the bill. It just keeps a normal part of the school year from quietly turning into debt that follows a family into the winter.
Sources
National Retail Federation: Back-to-School spending survey
Survey: 60% of parents have school-related debt, and most are planning to add more this fall
Additional context from Deloitte's 2026 back-to-school survey.
