BofA total card spending rose 6.0% Y/Y in the week to October 24 (prev. +4.9%), with spending growth among lower-income households consistently outpacing higher-income households over recent weeks

BofA total card spending rose 6.0% Y/Y in the week to October 24 (prev. +4.9%), with spending growth among lower-income households consistently outpacing higher-income households over recent weeks.

Bank card data sits in the tier of high-frequency private consumption trackers that desks use as a cross-check on official retail sales and PCE prints; it captures one issuer's panel rather than the population, so the market reads direction and trend persistence rather than the level, and it has tended to matter most when it diverges sharply from consensus expectations for the official series. The acceleration from the prior week fits a pattern seen in past episodes where late-cycle consumption held up longer than surveys implied, and desk economists typically map these aggregates into their nowcasts for the quarterly consumption contribution rather than treating any single week as signal. The distributional detail is the more unusual feature: lower-income spending outpacing higher-income cohorts cuts against the narrative, prevalent in recent years, of the low-end consumer exhausting pandemic-era buffers and trading down, and readings of that sort have historically been treated as evidence of either wage catch-up at the lower end or non-income funding such as credit drawdown, which carry different implications for durability. The follow-ons that distinguish those cases are revolving credit and delinquency data from the same issuer universe, plus whether other banks' card trackers corroborate the cohort pattern. Ahead of the next official retail sales and personal spending releases, prints like this typically shift positioning at the margin in consumption-sensitive sectors and in the front end only when they force a material revision to the official-data consensus. As a proprietary sample, the signal is corroborative rather than definitive.