Travel Spending Statistics (2026)

The average US household spent $1,346.64 on lodging away from home in 2024 and $681.83 on airline fares.

Public and other transportation, the category that contains airline fares, totalled $1,130.58, and vehicle rental with related charges came to $810.56.

Adding the clearly travel-specific lines gives roughly $2,028, about 2.6% of the $78,535 an average household spent in total.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey reports per consumer unit across all 135.8 million of them, and a large share took no trip at all in the year.

So $1,347 is national lodging spending divided by every household, not what a household that travels spends on hotels.

The BLS does not publish a per-traveller figure in this table, so the honest statement is that the real cost for people who travel is substantially higher and this dataset cannot say by how much.

Households spent $1,346.64 on lodging against $681.83 on airline fares, a ratio of roughly two to one.

That is the reverse of how most people plan a trip, where the flight is booked first and treated as the anchor cost.

It follows from arithmetic rather than luxury: a flight is bought once and a room is bought once per night, so the length of the trip drives the bill far more than the distance does.

Intercity train fares averaged $25.98 a year per household and intercity bus fares $11.77.

Against $681.83 on airline fares, that is roughly 26 times more spent flying than on trains.

For most of the country intercity rail is not a realistic option rather than a rejected one, and this line is the clearest single measure of that in federal data.

Food away from home was $3,944.94 and entertainment $3,609.38, both far larger than any travel line, and both include a holiday portion the survey does not isolate.

Fees and admissions at $934.90 covers attractions and events wherever they take place.

The practical implication is that true travel spending is higher than $2,028, because meals and activities on a trip are recorded in categories that also cover an ordinary Tuesday at home.

At about 2.6% of spending, travel is smaller than most people assume relative to housing at roughly a third and transport at roughly a sixth.

It is also one of the most compressible lines in the budget, which is why it moves sharply in both directions with confidence and with income.

That compressibility is exactly what makes it useful in a financial plan: it is a large discretionary block that can be adjusted without changing where you live or how you get to work.

Travel is predictable in timing and lumpy in cost, which is the specific shape a sinking fund is designed for.

Setting aside a twelfth of the intended annual amount each month converts a once-a-year four-figure bill into a routine transfer, and removes the temptation to reach for a credit card in the week of the trip.

It also makes the number explicit, which is the part most households skip. A trip budgeted at nothing tends to cost whatever the card allows.

Travel financed on a credit card and carried is the most expensive version of a discretionary purchase, because the interest applies to something already consumed.

At typical card rates the interest on a $3,000 trip carried for a year is a meaningful fraction of another trip.

That is the whole argument for the sinking fund rather than a moral one about spending less: the same holiday costs different amounts depending only on when it was funded.

The national figures point at lodging as the dominant controllable cost, which is where trip length and accommodation type do most of the work.

Airline fares are the most visible cost and the second largest, and the one most people optimise hardest.

Rental cars at $810.56 across all households are larger than they feel, and that line also captures leases and licences, so the pure holiday-hire portion is smaller.

There is no split between domestic and international travel in these figures, and no distinction between a business trip and a holiday.

There is no measure of how many households travelled at all, which is the number that would convert these averages into per-traveller costs.

And there is no breakdown by household income in the lines used here, so the distribution behind each average is invisible.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey collects spending from a nationally representative sample and reports annual averages per consumer unit.

A consumer unit is roughly a household: people related by blood, marriage or adoption, or otherwise sharing expenses.

Figures are for calendar year 2024 and are in current dollars, so comparisons across years include price changes as well as changes in behaviour.

Category figures are from the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey 2024 detailed mean expenditures table.

The average annual expenditure total, average income and the number of consumer units are from the BLS news release Consumer Expenditures--2024.

The combined travel figure of about $2,028 and its 2.6% share are our arithmetic on the published categories, and are labelled as such rather than presented as a BLS total.