What people spend on Christmas presents, country by country

Christmas is the single most expensive celebration of the year for most households, and the gap between what different nations budget for it is enormous. The clearest cross-country picture comes from a 2015 survey of more than 13,000 people across Europe, the US and Australia — and the patterns it found in overspending, indecision and debt held up remarkably well into the disrupted, locked-down Christmas of 2020.

Who spends the most on Christmas presents

The ING International Survey, run by Ipsos on ING's behalf, asked 13,633 people in 14 countries how much they planned to spend on Christmas presents that year. The United Kingdom came out on top with a median planned budget of €420, comfortably ahead of the USA in second place at €360 and Luxembourg in third at €300. Austria and France tied for fourth at €250 each, with Australia, Germany, Italy and Spain all bunched at €200.

At the other end of the table sits the Netherlands, with a median Christmas Day gift budget of just €40 — by far the lowest of any country surveyed. That is not really a sign of thrift: the Dutch mark Sinterklaas on 5 and 6 December, the feast of St Nicholas, and much of the gift-giving budget is spent then rather than on 24 or 25 December.

Nearly half of shoppers don't know their own budget

The same survey asked people how much they planned to spend — and a striking share simply didn't know. Across the 14 countries, between 33% (USA) and 50% (Belgium, Poland) of respondents said they had no idea what their Christmas spending would come to. That is worth bearing in mind when reading any "planned spend" figure: because indecisive shoppers are excluded from the median, actual outlay across a country's whole population is probably higher, and less predictable, than the headline number suggests.

Debt is the exception, not the rule

Despite the size of some of these budgets, going into debt to fund Christmas is rare. Only 9% of everyone surveyed said they had borrowed to pay for the previous year's celebrations. The USA stood out as the exception, at 20% — a full one-fifth of Americans polled — followed by Romania at 16% and the UK at 15%. At the other extreme, just 3% of Dutch respondents said the same, consistent with their far smaller gift budgets.

The US, Romania and the UK weren't just the three countries most likely to have gone into debt for Christmas — they were also the three most likely to say they planned to spend even more the following year.

The economics of a "wasted" gift

Large sums change hands at Christmas, but not all of it is spent well. In 1993, economist Joel Waldfogel published a paper in the American Economic Review titled "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas," built on a survey of Yale undergraduates about the gifts they had just received. Respondents were asked what they thought each gift had cost, and separately, the smallest amount of cash they would have accepted instead. The gap between the two is value destroyed by giving the "wrong" thing.

Waldfogel's central estimate was that gifts from a spouse or partner destroy around a tenth of their retail value on average, while gifts from members of the extended family — aunts, uncles, distant relatives less familiar with the recipient's taste — destroy closer to a third. Applied to the roughly $40 billion Americans were spending on gifts each year at the time, that implied a national "deadweight loss" of around $4 billion — by Waldfogel's own comparison, about a tenth the size of the loss economists typically attribute to income taxation. It is a deliberately provocative estimate from a small student sample, not a precise national account, but the underlying finding — that a meaningful share of gift spending buys something the recipient wouldn't have chosen for themselves — has been replicated in later surveys.

ING's own 2016 consumer survey found a similar pattern from the other direction: 82% of people polled in Europe said they had received a gift the previous Christmas, and of those, 15% said at least one gift was something they didn't like, didn't want or couldn't use. The median value attached to those unwanted presents was about €45 each.

Christmas 2020: a smaller, stranger holiday season

The Christmas being celebrated as this article was first published was unlike any other in the survey record. With large parts of Europe and North America under pandemic restrictions, both the amount people spent and what they spent it on shifted noticeably from 2019.

In the UK, YouGov's December 2020 survey found the average total festive spend fell to £883, down from £1,116 the year before — a drop of £233, driven mostly by cancelled travel and scaled-back socialising rather than by cheaper gifts. In fact, spending on presents specifically rose slightly, to £408 from £382 in 2019, suggesting people redirected some of the money they would have spent on nights out and family visits into gifts instead.

• Financially distressed UK households cut festive spend to £607, down from £819 in 2019.
• Households already carrying debt spent £1,015, down only slightly from £1,044 — the smallest fall of any group.
• Just 47% of UK respondents said "cancelling Christmas is not an option for me," down sharply from 62% in 2019.

In the US, Deloitte's 2020 Holiday Retail Survey found households expected to spend $1,387 over the season, a 7% fall on the previous year and the steepest year-on-year drop the survey had recorded since the 2008 financial crisis. Spending on travel fell by roughly a third, while spending on home furnishings and seasonal décor — the trappings of a holiday spent largely indoors — rose by about 12%.

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