# When Did Halloween Get Bigger Than Thanksgiving? 2026-10-10 · Somerset County, New Jersey · Reported Feature A new CIT Bank survey finds Halloween commanding surprisingly large budgets, especially among younger adults. The numbers suggest the holiday has become something more than a night of candy and costumes: a seasonal marketplace for identity, experience and shareable life. A new CIT Bank survey finds Halloween commanding surprisingly large budgets, especially among younger adults. The numbers suggest the holiday has become something more than a night of candy and costumes: a seasonal ma… --- Thanksgiving has the turkey, the travel, the table settings, the grocery bill and the annual negotiation over who is bringing what. Halloween, apparently, has the budget. A new CIT Bank survey of 1,065 U.S. adults finds 38% plan to spend at least $300 on Halloween this year. Only 19% expect to spend that much on Thanksgiving, and 11% on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. More than half of respondents, 54%, plan to spend at least $200 on Halloween. The overall average planned Halloween spend is $210. Among Gen Z, it rises to $270. Among Millennials, it reaches $308. That is interesting on its own. But the more revealing question is not whether Halloween has somehow become "bigger" than Thanksgiving in the cultural sense. It is why Halloween has become a holiday on which so many people can find $200, $300 or more worth of things they actively want to buy. Halloween changed jobs For generations, Halloween was easy to describe: costumes, candy, trick-or-treating and maybe a party. All of that is still there. But the modern version has expanded into something closer to a month-long seasonal experience. According to the CIT Bank survey, 67% of respondents plan to spend on outdoor decorations and 65% on home or party decor. Forty-six percent expect to spend at least $100 on experiences such as haunted houses or hayrides. More than a quarter are budgeting $40 or more for pet costumes. That is not one purchase. It is an ecosystem. There is the house. The yard. The costume. The kids' costumes. The dog's costume. The haunted attraction. The pumpkin patch. The party. The candy. The photographs. The video. The social post. And unlike Thanksgiving, most of those choices are highly self-directed. Thanksgiving is largely inherited. Families often already know where they are going, who will be there, what will be served and which traditions will be repeated. Even when the meal is expensive, the holiday itself tends to arrive with a script. Halloween has a much looser script. You choose the character. You choose the aesthetic. You decide whether your house gets one plastic skeleton or becomes a neighborhood landmark. You choose horror, humor, nostalgia, fandom, politics, a viral joke, a couples costume, a group theme or nothing at all. For younger adults in particular, Halloween may have become something Thanksgiving has difficulty becoming: a holiday of personal identity. The costume has a much larger audience now Seventy-one percent of Gen Z respondents say they spend money on costumes for themselves, compared with 53% of adults overall. Sixty-two percent of Gen Z use social platforms for costume inspiration. Twenty-nine percent want a costume tied to a current event or viral moment. Most strikingly, 52% of Gen Z and Millennials say they would pay more for a costume if they believed it could generate greater social-media engagement. Among Gen Z, 37% would spend more than $100 on such a costume. That changes the economics of dressing up. A costume once had a fairly limited audience: the people who saw you at school, at a party, at a bar or while you were walking around the neighborhood. Now the audience can include everyone you know, everyone they know, and everyone an algorithm decides might enjoy the joke. A $100 costume worn for four hours can sound extravagant. A $100 costume that produces photographs, TikToks, Instagram posts, group-chat material, profile pictures and a permanent little artifact of who you were in October 2026 can feel like a very different purchase. Halloween has, in effect, developed a temporary identity-production industry. Price-sensitive, but still spending There is one number in the survey that makes the whole thing more interesting: 63% of respondents say they are more price-sensitive about Halloween than they were last year. That should, in theory, dampen the celebration. Instead, planned spending remains substantial. Consumers are not behaving as if price no longer matters. They are adjusting around it. Seventy-one percent say they would buy candy in bulk. Sixty-two percent would shop at discount or dollar stores. Thirty-nine percent would make their own decorations. Thirty-eight percent would reuse or swap costumes, and 30% would make their own. People are searching for ways to preserve the holiday while trimming the cost of individual pieces. They are not necessarily abandoning the haunted attraction or the yard display. They may simply be buying the candy differently, making some decorations themselves or recycling part of last year's costume. The survey also finds 61% begin Halloween shopping before October, including 42% who start in September. That is another sign that Halloween is no longer functioning as a one-night purchase cycle. It has become a season people plan for. The algorithm has joined the costume party The influence goes beyond social media. Twenty percent of Gen Z respondents say they use artificial intelligence when developing costume ideas. Halloween has always borrowed from the culture around it. Movie characters become costumes. Political moments become masks. Memes become T-shirts. Celebrities become wigs. The difference now is the speed and machinery of the feedback loop. A viral moment can become a costume almost immediately. A social platform can tell millions of people what is gaining traction. An AI tool can help turn a vague idea into a recognizable concept. Then the finished costume returns to the same platforms as content. The holiday is not just absorbing popular culture anymore. It is participating in the production of it. So, is Halloween really bigger than Thanksgiving? Not literally, and the CIT Bank survey should not be read as a national accounting of every dollar spent on each holiday. It measures what respondents say they plan to spend, and the online survey used a non-probability sample that was weighted to the U.S. population. In this survey, twice as many adults say they plan to spend at least $300 on Halloween as say the same about Thanksgiving. That suggests Halloween has acquired an unusually broad set of spending opportunities, and younger adults appear especially willing to participate in them. Thanksgiving remains one of America's largest family holidays. Halloween is doing a different job. It is becoming a platform. A platform for decorating. For going out. For fandom. For humor. For showing off a neighborhood. For dressing the dog. For trying on an identity for one night. And increasingly, for turning that identity into something designed to be seen well beyond the room where the costume was actually worn. Maybe America never consciously decided Halloween should get this big. It simply became the holiday where nearly everything is optional, and because nearly everything is optional, nearly everything can become personal. And personal things are very easy to spend money on. Source and methodology Primary source: CIT Bank / PR Newswire, “Halloween Budgets Top Thanksgiving: 38% Plan to Spend $300 or More, CIT Bank Survey Finds,” Oct. 7, 2026 --- ProbleMattic is written and maintained by Matthew Kulcsar, a software engineer, project manager, technologist, platform builder, emergency-services-trained helper, grandfather, and lifelong collector of broken systems, odd behaviors, and useful nonsense.