A 22-year-old in Austin buys his mother a gold bracelet, a spa certificate, and a brunch reservation that runs $150 before tip. A 68-year-old retiree in Ohio picks up a $30 bouquet and a handwritten card. Both believe they nailed Mother’s Day. Both are probably right. But the dollar gap between them has never been wider, and the numbers behind it deserve more scrutiny than most headlines have given them.
According to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey, conducted with Prosper Insights & Analytics, Americans spent a combined $38 billion on Mother’s Day this year, up from roughly $33.5 billion in 2024. The generational split is dramatic: in the NRF’s 2025 pre-holiday survey (the most recent with published generational breakdowns), shoppers ages 18 to 24 said they planned to spend an average of about $922, while baby boomers budgeted around $168. Whether the 2026 figures shifted from those benchmarks is not yet clear, because the NRF had not released a comparable generational breakdown at the time of publication.
Those figures have echoed across retail coverage this spring. But the story underneath them is more complicated than a spending scoreboard. It involves guilt, social pressure, survey methods that deserve scrutiny, and a stubborn gap between what gift-givers buy and what mothers say they actually want.
The spending picture, survey by survey
No single dataset tells the whole story. The NRF’s topline figures drive most headlines, but a critical detail often gets lost: the survey asks respondents how much they plan to spend across all recipients, not on a single mother. A Gen Z shopper buying for a mom, a grandmother, a partner’s mother, and a mentor could easily hit $922 without spending extravagantly on any one person. The headline framing of “per mom” oversimplifies what the data actually measures.
Other polls add useful texture. A brand-commissioned survey from Tiff’s Treats, released in May 2026, reported that about three-quarters of U.S. adults sent a Mother’s Day gift, a figure the company extrapolated to roughly 200 million participants. Many respondents in that poll said they spent $50 or less, far below the NRF’s Gen Z average.
Both figures could coexist if a small cluster of high spenders pulls the average upward. But no publicly available source breaks down the spending distribution in enough detail to confirm that. Until one does, the generational averages are best treated as rough indicators, not settled facts.
Separately, a Kantar survey commissioned by Teleflora found that 91% of mothers report feeling “mom guilt,” a finding that cut across Gen Z, millennial, and Gen X moms. The poll was brand-commissioned research designed partly to generate publicity for Teleflora’s campaign, and neither the press release nor available coverage discloses the sample size, so the 91% figure should be read as directional rather than definitive. Still, the emotional backdrop matters: younger adults may feel heightened pressure to demonstrate appreciation through purchases, especially when social media turns a private brunch into a public performance. Linking that guilt directly to higher spending, though, is an inference no available study has confirmed with transactional evidence.
What moms say they actually want
If the spending numbers raise eyebrows, the preference data should raise more. A survey of 288 mothers and 292 fathers conducted by the Rutgers Center for Women in Business found that mothers overwhelmingly prefer shared family activities or uninterrupted free time over physical gifts. Givers, meanwhile, default to flowers, sweets, and jewelry.
That mismatch is not new. It has surfaced in multiple years of Mother’s Day research, and it suggests that higher spending does not automatically translate into higher satisfaction for the person being celebrated. A $922 haul of gifts matters less if what Mom really wanted was a quiet morning and a family hike.
The Rutgers sample is modest and not nationally representative, so the findings should not be stretched too far. But they echo a broader body of well-being research showing that experiences and time tend to produce more lasting satisfaction than material goods.
Why the headline numbers deserve a closer look
The $38 billion total and the generational averages have been repeated across dozens of outlets, but the underlying NRF/Prosper methodology, including sample size, margin of error, and weighting scheme, has not been published in full in any of the coverage reviewed for this article. The NRF typically releases summary findings through press materials and reserves detailed data for members, which makes independent verification difficult.
“Intention-to-spend surveys are useful for tracking directional trends, but they are not the same as transaction data,” said Katherine Cullen, the NRF’s vice president of industry and consumer insights, in a 2024 summary of the federation’s methodology. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Intention-to-spend surveys, which ask people how much they plan to lay out, routinely overstate actual outlays. Credit-card data from payment processors often tells a more grounded story after the fact, but those figures for Mother’s Day 2026 have not yet been published.
There are also open questions the available data does not answer. The NRF does publish broad category breakdowns: special outings, jewelry, gift cards, clothing, and flowers consistently rank among the top choices. But the surveys do not reveal which categories are driving the Gen Z surge specifically, or how much of the year-over-year increase reflects inflation rather than a genuine jump in gift volume. And it remains unclear how much of the Gen Z figure is shaped by the fact that this cohort is entering peak earning years while still feeling the cultural pull to perform generosity on social media.
Where love and money stop lining up
Taken together, the evidence supports a few confident claims. Americans spent heavily on Mother’s Day in 2026, likely at or near record levels. Younger adults appear significantly more willing to splurge than older generations. And a large majority of mothers wrestle with guilt and pressure that the holiday, for all its good intentions, does not always relieve.
Beyond that, the precise dollar gaps and the psychological motives behind them remain blurry. The safest read is straightforward: love for moms is real and widespread, but the numbers used to measure it are rougher than they look.
And if the Rutgers researchers are right, the most valuable Mother’s Day gift might not require a credit card at all. It might just require showing up, putting the phone away, and letting Mom decide how to spend the morning.
