Backpacks are bought, first day photos are posted, and now the bill is showing up in your inbox. American families spent a record $146.8 billion getting kids ready for school and college this year, and a lot of it went on cards that get paid off later, not now. If you said yes to a “pay in four” button at checkout this month, this one’s for you.
Let’s start with what actually happened this back to school season. The National Retail Federation says families with K through 12 students spent $43.3 billion this year, up from $39.4 billion in 2025. College families spent even more, $103.5 billion, crossing the $100 billion mark for the first time ever. Add it up and you get $146.8 billion, a new record.
Per family, that works out to an average of $863.86 for K through 12 supplies, clothes, and electronics, according to the NRF’s survey. Electronics alone averaged $293.11 per K through 12 household and $341.95 per college household. Laptops and calculators add up fast, and so does everything else on that supply list your kid swears is “required.”
Here’s the part that caught my attention. Nearly half of American families, 45%, say they used buy now, pay later (BNPL) services this year, up from 39% in 2025. BNPL just means splitting a purchase into a few payments, often four, instead of paying the full price at checkout. About one in three families expect BNPL to cover more than half of their total school spending.
A separate survey of parents published in late July found that 45% planned to take on debt specifically for back to school shopping, up from just 34% two years ago. More than half, 57%, already had credit card debt going into the season, and 63% expected to add to that balance. Sixty percent said their kids were asking for items they’d seen trending online, and 54% admitted they’d rather charge something than tell their kid no.
BNPL plans feel painless because the first payment is often small and due today, with the rest spread over the coming weeks. The catch is that 60% of BNPL users are juggling multiple loans at once, and 41% reported paying late on at least one in the past year. Miss a payment and you’re often looking at late fees, and sometimes a ding to your credit report, depending on the provider.
Stack four or five of these plans across different stores and you’ve basically rebuilt a credit card statement, just without a single due date to track. That’s the trap. It’s not that BNPL is evil, it’s that it’s easy to lose the thread when the payments are scattered across five different apps instead of one bill.
This is all happening while inflation sits at 3.4% for the year ending in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Federal Reserve is holding interest rates steady at 3.5% to 3.75%, where they’ve been since late last year. The Fed doesn’t meet again until September 15 and 16, so borrowing costs on credit cards aren’t getting cheaper anytime soon. That makes carrying a balance, whether it’s BNPL or a credit card, more expensive to sit on than it might have felt a few years ago.
Nobody wants to be the parent who says no to the shoes everyone else has. But BNPL doesn’t make something cost less, it just moves the pain to a date you’re not looking at yet. If you already clicked “pay in four” this month, that’s fine, you’re not behind. Just make sure you actually know when those payments hit.
None of this requires you to be perfect. It just requires you to know what you owe and when it’s due, which honestly puts you ahead of a lot of people right now.
