A distributional approach to U.S. personal consumption expenditures: an overview

We distribute Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) across households in the U.S. using microdata from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) for the period 2017–2021. Since the CE mainly collects data on out-of-pocket spending, we supplement it with imputations based on other survey and administrative data to better match PCE definitions, particularly with respect to health care. Over the study period, out of the total PCE (excluding expenditures by non-profits serving households), the bottom 20% accounted for between 8.4% and 9.5%, while the top 20% accounted for 39.4–41.6%. The 90/10 ratio for equivalized PCE ranged from 3.3 to 3.7, and the Gini coefficient from 0.31 to 0.33.