U.S. retail sales experienced healthy growth in December 2025, aligning holiday season results closely with its forecast for record consumer spending, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF).
“December Retail Monitor data saw a sharp surge in growth as consumers continued prioritizing holiday spending on family and friends,” said NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay. “Continued economic momentum helped land 2025 holiday sales near the top of NRF’s forecast, reaffirming that consumers remain on solid footing.”
The Retail Monitor, which draws from actual, anonymized credit and debit card transaction data, showed that holiday sales from November 1 through December 31, 2025, increased 4.1% year-over-year.
This performance fell within NRF’s pre-season forecast range of 3.7% – 4.2% growth over the same period in 2024, which projected total holiday spending surpassing $1 trillion for the first time. Official December figures from the U.S. Census Bureau have not yet been released.
Key December highlights include:
Total retail sales (excluding car dealers and gas stations) rose 1.26% month over month on a seasonally adjusted basis and 3.54% year over year, unadjusted. This marked a significant increase from November’s 0.12% monthly gain and 4.53% annual gain.
Core retail sales (excluding car dealers, gas stations, and restaurants) climbed 1.6% month over month and 3.58% year over year, compared to a slight 0.04% monthly decline and 4.66% annual increase in November.
A calendar shift contributed to December’s strong performance, as a late Thanksgiving pushed Cyber Monday to December 1, adding an extra high-volume shopping day to the month’s totals.
The full year’s impact was notable, with total 2025 retail sales up 4.93% over 2024 and core sales rising 5.08%.
December sales increased in six out of the nine tracked categories on a year-over-year basis, with strong performances in:
Clothing and accessories stores: +6.11% year-over-year, +2.05% month-over-month
Sporting goods, hobby, music, and book stores: +5.16% year-over-year, +3.52% month-over-month
Digital products: +3.6% year-over-year, +0.98% month-over-month
General merchandise stores: +3.42% year-over-year, +2.9% month-over-month
Grocery and beverage stores: +2.85% year-over-year, +0.33% month-over-month
Health and personal care stores: +2.5% year-over-year, +1.92% month-over-month
Categories showing year-over-year declines included electronics and appliance stores (-0.09%), furniture and home furnishings stores (-0.82%), and building and garden supply stores (-5.3%), though all posted positive monthly gains.
Ethan Faverino is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
The Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity released preliminary employment data for November 2025, showing that Arizona’s economy added 21,300 nonfarm jobs year-over-year on a not-seasonally adjusted (NSA) basis, representing a 0.6% increase compared to November 2024.
This growth was driven primarily by the private sector, which added 28,000 jobs over the year, while government employment declined by 6,700 positions.
Arizona’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate increased to 4.3% in November 2025, up from 4.2% in September and 3.9% one year earlier. Over the same period, the U.S. seasonally adjusted unemployment rate also rose, reaching 4.6%
The state’s seasonally adjusted labor force grew by 27,226 individuals from September to November 2025 and increased by 83,081 individuals (2.2%) year-over-year, reflecting continued population and workforce expansion.
From October to November 2025, Arizona added 17,500 total nonfarm jobs. Key monthly gains occurred in:
Trade, Transportation, and Utilities: +10,600 jobs
Government: +2,400 jobs, led by Local Government Education with +2,200 jobs
Professional and Business Services: +1,600 jobs
Leisure and Hospitality: +1,500 jobs
Other Services: +1,400 jobs
Manufacturing: +1,300 jobs
Information: +1,000 jobs
Losses were reported in Financial Activities (-1,200 jobs) and Construction (-1,100 jobs), with a minor decline in Private Educational Services (-100 jobs). Health Care and Social Assistance showed no change month over month.
Over the 12 months ending in November 2025, the strongest job gains were made by:
Health Care and Social Assistance: +14,500 jobs
Professional and Business Services: +9,000 jobs
Other Services: +4,800 jobs
Construction: +2,100 jobs
Leisure and Hospitality: +1,900 jobs
Natural Resources and Mining: +1,300 jobs
Private Educational Services: +1,200 jobs
Financial Activities: +1,100 jobs
Year-over-year losses occurred in Trade, Transportation, and Utilities (-6,700 jobs), Government (-6,700 jobs), and Manufacturing (-1,300 jobs).
Among Arizona’s major metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler MSA recorded the largest year-over-year employment gain, adding 78,100 jobs and bringing total employment to 2,801,000.
The Tucson MSA also saw solid growth, with employment increasing by 14,300 jobs, while the Prescott-Prescott Valley MSA added 2,800 jobs over the year. Smaller gains were reported in the Lake Havasu City-Kingman MSA (1,900 jobs), Flagstaff (1,300 jobs), and Sierra Vista-Douglas (800 jobs). The Yuma MSA experienced the opposite with a year-over-year decline of 1,500 jobs.
Statewide, Arizona’s total nonfarm employment reached 3,302,200 in November 2025 on a not seasonally adjusted basis, up from 3,280,900 one year earlier.
Ethan Faverino is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
Friday’s jobs report shows the American labor market is turning a corner. The unemployment rate fell to 4.4%, and average wages grew 40% faster than inflation. Rising real wages are a stark contrast to the Biden administration, where 25% inflation caused an affordability crisis that President Donald Trump and Republicans are digging us out from.
The report also showed that unproductive government jobs have fallen by nearly 300,000 over the past year, reducing a significant drag on the real economy. The number of discouraged workers declined by almost 200,000 last month, and the number of Americans quitting their jobs increased significantly, indicating that workers are increasingly confident they can find a job.
Topline job creation remains mediocre, but hires are a lagging economic indicator. In fact, the labor market is far stronger than this headline number suggests.
Recent economic growth smashed expectations, with GDP rising by more than 4% in the most recent quarter. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model suggests growth will continue above 4%, representing a historic rise in living standards. Holiday spending also exceeded expectations, with Visa and Mastercard announcing growth of more than 4%, revealing a healthy American consumer.
Small businesses, America’s job creation engine, will respond to the strong economy and consumers by expanding and hiring, setting the stage for strong job gains in the months ahead.
According to a new Citizens Bank survey of small businesses, two-thirds of small businesses expect their revenues to increase in the first quarter of this year. And a new JPMorgan Chase survey finds that three-quarters of small businesses anticipate revenue growth.
Fast economic growth and increasing Main Street revenues don’t happen in a vacuum, as many left-wing pundits would have you believe. They are the direct result of good public policy that empowers businessmen, not bureaucrats.
Exhibit A is Republicans’ Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law last July, which cut taxes for entrepreneurs and employees. The bill restored and made permanent 100% immediate expensing for small businesses, encouraging expansion, development, and hiring. It also made permanent the 20% small business tax deduction, allowing more stores to become profitable.
It expanded the standard deduction and child tax deduction and exempted tip and overtime income, giving workers what should be their largest tax refunds in American history this spring. Funds that will help folks overcome Biden’s affordability crisis.
Sadly, every Democrat in Congress voted against these significant middle-class tax cuts and in favor of the biggest tax hike in American history. Republicans need to sell this win to independents and apolitical folks every day from now until the midterms to keep control of Congress.
Mass deportations, the Epstein files, and transgender bathrooms may be the issues that matter most to the MAGA base, but they are not the ones that will get Republicans the 51% coalition needed to win. They will not motivate Martha, three doors down the block, Jorge, in the apartment complex across the street, or David and Michael, the brother duo trying to get their Main Street cafe off the ground.
No matter what the latest America First social media influencer says, preserving and expanding the opportunity economy will always be the winning message the broad conservative coalition needs to overcome the Democrat siren song of “free stuff.”
The Trump administration and Congressional Republicans have notched numerous wins to advance this engine of increased well-being and affordability. Now it’s time to connect the dots for the general public. Big job gains in the months ahead will help drive these victories home.
Alfredo Ortiz is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, CEO of Job Creators Network, author of “The Real Race Revolutionaries,” and co-host of the Main Street Matters podcast.
Arizona has hardly had an opportunity to recover from the aftershocks of Biden-omics. The trillions of dollars injected into the economy through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act continue to work their way through the system in the form of higher prices and eroded purchasing power. Open-border policies that expanded the labor supply at the lower and middle ends of the wage scale have depressed wages. And the Biden Administration’s unprecedented regulatory burden on industry, a nearly $2 trillion drag on the economy, will take far longer than a year to unwind and correct.
Unfortunately for Arizona, efforts to fix these problems at the federal level cannot be fully realized here at home because Katie Hobbs remains our Governor.
Hobbs has harmed Arizona’s recovery, overseeing a massive fall from 4th in the nation in job growth to 47th. She inherited a booming local economy after a Republican legislature and Governor ushered in a 2.5 percent income tax, incentivized entrepreneurs and small businesses, prioritized deregulation, and expanded choice and freedom in education. Yet Hobbs has managed to squander that opportunity. In fact, it takes a special skill set to be perfectly set up for success and then drive a working model into the ground.
And Hobbs knows she’s to blame. That’s why she’s now desperately trying to reinvent herself by pushing Trump-esque tax cut rhetoric while clinging to the same big-spending, high-tax policies that caused the damage in the first place. At her core, she remains a California-style Democrat who would rather govern Newsom-style than embrace the Republican solutions that actually work. That’s why, despite a Republican legislature that has delivered tax relief bills, more disciplined budgets, and common-sense deregulation, she has earned a reputation as the veto queen.
As a result, Arizonans are dealing with real affordability woes, and they best not hinge their hopes on Hobbs.
Despite responsible budgeting and repeated tax relief efforts by Republican lawmakers, affordability pressures continue to mount. Taxes are creeping higher at every level of government. Utility bills have surged. Housing costs are outpacing wage growth. And programs intended to help struggling families are losing billions to fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
That is why the 2026 legislative session must focus on Affordable Arizona…
Guess what! Inflation, growth, jobs: Conventional wisdom from America’s economic punditry was across-the-board wrong. Again.
At the year’s start the punditry predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a surge of inflation and would likely trigger recession. Well, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released Consumer Price Index (CPI) numbers on Thursday. Reuters’ polling of private economists predicted inflation would accelerate to 3.1% year-over-year, the fastest pace since 2023. The actual BLS figure came in at 2.7%, with core inflation even lower at 2.6%.
But the news gets better. Year-over-year inflation means it includes inflationary pressures from the end of Biden’s presidency. It’s a very lagging figure.
To understand what inflation’s doing now, and to filter out some of the data’s noise, a better gauge is to look at inflation over the last two months, which came in at 1.2% annualized, well below the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
There is a small caveat to this good news. Due to the Schumer government shutdown, BLS was unable to collect all the usual data for the CPI report, so some items were left out. The economists who predicted accelerating inflation are thus arguing that inflation would, with all the data, have been much higher and thus excusing their bad forecasts.
However, as New York Fed President John Williams points out, the missing data “pushed down the CPI reading, probably by a tenth or so.” OK, so topline inflation was 2.8% while the annualized two-month figure goes to 1.8%, still well below consensus forecast and still below the Fed’s target rate.
What about Trump’s tariffs? To be sure, they pushed some prices up faster than they otherwise would have. But the tariffs only applied to a small fraction of all the goods and services sold in America. So, when it comes to overall inflation, the net effect could never be more than a one-time rounding error.
Further, inflation is fundamentally a monetary phenomenon. These tariff-induced price bumps occurred against a background of the underlying inflationary impulse from money supply interacting with money demand. The Fed has run a moderately restrictive policy for years, so naturally inflation is falling.
Assuming at least one of the Fed’s legion of economists can do this two-month calculation and has the temerity to show it to Chair Powell and the rest of the Fed’s leadership, then further Fed rate cuts should be assured and imminent on the road to neutral.
And what about that predicted recession? After inflation, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) soared 3.8% in the second quarter of this year, while the Atlanta Fed’s “Nowcast” of third quarter GDP is a still-impressive 3.5%.
Some of Reuters’ economists will likely portray this slight slowdown in growth as “scary” and a sign of pending recession. Nonsense. The economy is ripping, with the only recession pending threatening the salaries of those economists making silly forecasts.
Finally, those still desperate to argue economic weakness might turn to the labor market. The economy generated about 166,000 jobs a month during Biden’s last year in office. So far under Trump the economy has generated about 50,000 jobs a month. Sounds scary, but much of that decline occurred because federal employment fell by 27,000 jobs a month.
The even bigger jobs story is that employment by foreign-born workers has fallen by about 100,000 a month under Trump. This is what happens when immigration laws are enforced and the border is secured. Put it all together and private-sector native-born employment is doing very well.
And the cherry on top is that after stagnating for the four years of the Biden presidency, median real wages are now rising at a 1.6% annualized rate. Rising wages and plentiful private-sector jobs, not gimmicks like Obamacare subsidies and rent controls, are how you prosper American workers or, in today’s parlance, address “affordability.”
Just don’t be surprised if you don’t hear that from the legacy media.
J.D. Foster is a contributor to the Daily Caller News Foundation. He is the former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget and former chief economist and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He now resides in relative freedom in the hills of Idaho.
