DOC: Furniture sales in April up sharply again

WASHINGTON — For the second consecutive month, sales of furniture and home furnishings were up by more than 7% according to the Department of Commerce’s advance monthly estimates.

The numbers are likely due to pulled forward demand, with consumers working to get ahead of tariff-based price increases. Reciprocal tariffs on most countries were announced on April 2 and subsequently lowered for all nations but China on April 9. For the rest of the month, and up until a pause was announced on May 12, product from China carried a 145% tariff.

For the month, the furniture and home furnishings stores category recorded an estimated adjusted $11.553 billion in sales, an increase of 7.8% compared with April 2024’s $10.72 billion, and up 0.3% vs. March’s preliminary adjusted $11.519 billion.

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Year-to-date, the furniture category has accumulated an unadjusted $43.606 billion, which is 6.2% ahead of 2024’s pace.

The overall retail snapshot showed an estimated adjusted total of $724.131 billion, which represented a 5.2% gain on April 2024’s $688.629 billion and a 0.1% increase on March’s adjusted preliminary $723.714 billion.

In addition to furniture and home furnishings’ sharp year-over-year gains, motor vehicle and parts dealers posted a 9.4% increase with health and personal care stores (8.5%), non-store retailers (7.5%) and miscellaneous store retailers (6.0%) with increases that outpaced overall retail.

Of interest to the home furnishings industry, building material, garden equipment and supplies dealers were up 3.2% year-over-year in April.

The DOC’s advance estimates are based on a sub-sample of the U.S. Census Bureau’s full retail and food services sample. A stratified random sampling method is used to select approximately 5,500 retail and food services firms whose sales are then weighted and benchmarked to represent the complete universe of more than 3 million retail and food services firms.