Victorian households spent $1,700.1 million on clothing and footwear in December 2025. In February 2026 they spent $944.7 million.
December ran 1.8 times February. Both figures come from the ABS Monthly Household Spending Indicator, May 2026 release, current price, original series.
Now take the seasonality out. On the seasonally adjusted series, those same two months sit within about 1% of each other. The adjusted ratio is 0.99.
December 2025 was not 80% better than February 2026. It was the same month wearing a different hat.
What the adjusted series is actually doing
Seasonal adjustment strips out the part of a month that repeats every single year: Christmas, school holidays, the number of trading days, the sales calendar. What is left is the part that genuinely moved.
Run that on Victorian clothing and footwear and the December to February drop almost disappears. A 1.8x fall on the original series becomes roughly 1% on the adjusted one.
That is the whole finding. The spike is the calendar, and the trough is the same calendar pointing the other way.
The move: stop treating consecutive months as a comparison. They are not measuring the same thing.
Your curve is not this curve, and it does not matter
One caveat before the two mistakes, because it is the first objection every owner raises. This is Victorian household spending across the whole clothing and footwear category, not your P&L.
Your own December to February ratio will not be 1.8. A discount-led brand will swing harder. A brand doing mostly repeat basics will swing less.
The amplitude is yours. The shape is the state’s, and the mistake is the same either way: you cannot tell your performance apart from your calendar by looking at consecutive months.
The move: measure your own December to February ratio for the last two years. If it is stable, that stability is your seasonal correction, and you already own the number you need.
Mistake one costs you in January
December closes at a record. Every dashboard is green. The natural read is that the business has stepped up a level.
So the budget goes up in January. The December winners get reordered, the ad spend holds at the December rate, and hiring gets planned against the new number.
The ABS series says that level was never the business. Victorian clothing and footwear fell from $1,700.1 million in December 2025 to $944.7 million in February 2026, and on the adjusted series nothing underneath it changed.
January commits real cash to a level the calendar was holding up. The bill arrives in February, when the cash is out the door and the revenue is not.
Mistake two costs you in March
February prints the low. On the original ABS series it is the $944.7 million against December’s $1,700.1 million, and it reads like the business has broken.
So the owner cuts. Ad spend comes down, the next buy gets trimmed, hiring freezes.
The adjusted series says the underlying level held: those two months sat within about 1% of each other. The cut lands on a business that is performing, and it lands in the exact window where the next season’s buy needs lead time.
Neither month is evidence of anything. Both are the calendar.
December revenue overstates margin by more than it overstates trend
73% of Australian shoppers wait for a sales event before buying, per the Australia Post Omnibus Survey of July 2025. Among Gen Z that figure is 96%.
Australians spent $11.6 billion online on fashion and apparel in calendar year 2025, up 11.5% on 2024, per the Australia Post eCommerce Report 2026. Over the same year the average online basket was $96, down 0.4%.
Read those two together. The category grew 11.5% while the average order got slightly smaller, so the growth came from order frequency, not from people spending more per order.
The same report puts the average Australian household at 16 retailers in 2025, more than double a decade earlier, with 24% of all Australian retail spending happening online, up 1.6 percentage points. More retailers in the consideration set, more orders, and most of them timed to a sale.
That has a margin consequence. December volume arrives discounted, so December revenue and December margin do not move together.
The move: put margin by month next to revenue by month before Q4 is locked. Look at the revenue line on its own and you are budgeting off your least representative month.
The trend number, if you want one
Victorian households spent $14.46 billion on clothing and footwear in the 12 months to May 2026, up 4.0% on the 12 months before it. That is the trend line under all of this. Not 80% up, not collapsing.
Two cuts of the same ABS release are worth holding side by side. Across the 12 months to May 2026, Victorian spending was up 4.0% on the 12 months before it. In the single month of May 2026, it ran 5.4% above May 2025, against 6.6% nationally.
Victoria is growing, and it is growing slower than the country. That is a useful thing to know when you are setting a Q4 number off a national benchmark or an overseas parent’s target.
The move: benchmark your Q4 plan against the Victorian rate, not the national one.
What to change before Q4 locks
One comparison, changed before the money is committed.
- Compare December to last December, not December to February. Same month, same seasonality, and what is left is the part you caused.
- Set the Q4 revenue target off last year’s December, adjusted only for what you have actually changed since then: store count, SKU count, price, channel mix. Not off the current run rate.
- Hold the January budget flat until you have a like-for-like December read. December closing high is not evidence that January will.
- Put December margin next to December revenue. With 73% of shoppers waiting for a sale, the two lines separate in exactly the month you are extrapolating from.
Name the cost, because there is one. Like-for-like comparison needs at least 13 months of clean history, and plenty of businesses do not have it in usable shape. It also takes your best-looking number off the wall, because December against last December is a far smaller figure than December against February.
And if you have changed the business materially since last December, a new channel, a price rise, twice the SKUs, then say so out loud and treat the comparison as directional. A flagged comparison beats a flattering one.
The Q4 budget gets locked once. Make the comparison honest before it does, not in March when the cut is already made.