Americans spent a record $13.1 billion on Halloween in 2025, averaging $114.45 per person, both all-time highs, according to the National Retail Federation’s own consumer survey. The NRF releases its 2026 figures in late September, but the run-up to this year’s holiday already shows retailers leaning harder than ever into one specific driver of that growth: nostalgia for exactly the kind of Halloween decor nobody was buying new a decade ago.

Where the Record-Breaking Money Actually Goes

Per that same NRF survey, last year’s $13.1 billion broke down into $4.3 billion on costumes, $4.2 billion on decorations, $3.9 billion on candy, and $700 million on greeting cards. The costume breakdown tells its own nostalgia story: witch topped the adult costume list at 5.6 million people planning to dress as one, a costume choice with roots going back generations, while children gravitated toward characters like Spider-Man and classic witches and princesses rather than whatever franchise happened to be dominating that particular news cycle. Decorations, at $4.2 billion, represented the single largest jump in the category mix compared to prior years.

Retailers Are Building Entire Lines Around Halloweens Past

Michaels made that bet explicit for 2026, unveiling six new Halloween decor collections it’s calling a “Halloween Rewind,” rolling out through summer 2026, according to Michaels’ own press release. The lineup leans hard into specific decades rather than generic “spooky season” branding: one collection revives late-90s roller-rink aesthetics with disco ghosts and candy-colored pumpkins, another pulls from neighborhood block-party Halloweens with classic checkered patterns and orange-and-black color schemes, and a third channels Victorian gothic manors. Chief Merchandising Officer Stacey Shively framed the strategy plainly, saying Halloween “has always been about revisiting the traditions, stories and rituals that make the season feel magical year after year.”

A Holiday That Sells Itself on Memory

Halloween has always had a nostalgia component, but the current retail strategy treats it as the primary sales lever rather than a secondary theme. Costumes and candy brands lean on decades-old formulas because they still work; classic candy corn, Reese’s pumpkins, and full-size chocolate bars remain fixtures of trick-or-treat bags essentially unchanged from what parents handed out themselves. Retailers have simply gotten more explicit about naming the decades they’re borrowing from, turning a seasonal aisle into something closer to a themed time capsule.

NRF’s participation numbers back up why that bet keeps paying off. Adults aren’t outgrowing Halloween the way marketers once assumed they would; they’re spending more on it, older, than any generation before them. A holiday built almost entirely on repetition, the same costume archetypes, the same candy, the same porch decorations reinterpreted in new colorways, doesn’t need reinvention to keep breaking its own spending record. It just needs retailers willing to keep dressing familiar memories up as something new to buy.