Your Clients Are Spending More on Essentials. That Changes Their Cash.
By Consaya Editorial — 2026-10-31
Half of every dollar your clients spend now goes to housing and food. That's the highest share in 15 years.
The numbers come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2025. Housing alone takes 33.9% of household spending. Food another 13%. The year before, in 2024, families spent $1,988 less on these two categories combined. Not a small shift.
The puzzle is that pretax household income rose 6.4% to $110,847 in 2025, outpacing inflation and total spending growth. More money came in. Yet more of what went out was locked into rent, utilities, and groceries. Food and housing were the only two major spending categories to increase significantly last year. Everything else stalled.
The detail matters. Americans spent $1,579 on meat, poultry, fish and eggs in 2025—up 11.7% year-on-year and double the 2010 figure. Protein alone accounted for 95% of the rise in at-home food spending over 2023–2025. That's not lifestyle choice. That's input inflation hitting hard.
Why This Matters to a Consultancy
Your clients who are employed are in a bind. Gross income rises. Real take-home shrinks because the cost of staying alive went up faster than their pay cheque. They feel poorer even though the payslip looks better. That tension—between headline numbers and actual breathing room—is what clients bring to a business when they're thinking about restructuring, redundancy, or cost control. They're not pessimistic because the economy is weak. They're anxious because they're running out of room.
For consultancies in the UAE, this is background noise. Your invoicing, client records, and quote pipeline don't track household spending patterns. But your client pipeline does track client anxiety. Clients squeezed on cashflow are harder to move on decisions, slower to approve scope, and quicker to chase payment terms. If half your revenue depends on decisiveness from salaried executives who feel their discretionary income evaporating, you're working against pressure you can't see in the invoice.
Consaya doesn't predict client behaviour or analyse their finances.