Estimates of Canadian monthly

household consumption expenditure

Philip Smith

Last update: May 31, 2025

On this page you can find my estimates of monthly Canadian household expenditure on consumer goods and services. The estimates are available from January 2017 to date and they are seasonally adjusted at annual rates. 

These statistics are interpolated from the quarterly national accounts estimates for consumer expenditure that are released four times a year by Statistics Canada. The interpolation is done with a linear modelling approach that uses closely related monthly series, mostly from the retail trade survey, the consumer price index survey and the real gross domestic product by industry program, via the method proposed by G. Chow and A. Lin. This approach guarantees that the estimates for three months within a quarter always average to Statistics Canada’s corresponding quarterly estimate, while the month-to-month variations mirror as closely as possible those of the related series. 

When the related series data are available for months beyond the last published quarterly estimate, the models are also used to extrapolate the monthly series forward. And when the latest month’s data are unavailable for a particular related series,  auto-regressive integrated moving-average (ARIMA) models are used to fill the gap. 

This modelling approach is documented in this paper. 

The remainder of this web page displays charts and tables for these monthly estimates. Also provided are spreadsheet files containing the full time series from January 2017 to the latest month, in terms of consumer expenditure value, price and volume.