Gen X led pet spending per household in six of nine years

My brother sits right on the line between Gen X and Millennials, in the stretch people sometimes call Xennial. This year his youngest turned eighteen, so the house is empty of children for the first time in two decades. It is not empty of animals though. There is a horse. There are cows and a bull. There’s a bird, a tortoise, three dogs, and fish. There was a cat for a while too. He’s also been fully committed to a mobile vet for their dogs for several years now.

I had filed all of that under quirky older brother traits and some form of self-expression that condemns him to an alternate fatherhood, endless responsibility and every flavor of companionship.

Then I found myself recently re-reading APPA's 2026 State of the Industry report, and laughing when I stopped on a section that reads like a snapshot of my brother's back yard. "The Gen X 'empty nest' drives ownership growth across multiple pet species." I suppose he’s not alone.

The tale of the tape: Gen X dog ownership up 12% YoY, cats up 8%, birds up 25%, reptiles up 20%, freshwater fish up 17%.

The generational conversation in pet has been about Gen Z for a while now, and there is a real case for that, which we will get to. But the spending record underneath the ownership data has been saying something steadier, and for longer, than it has been credited with.

TL;DR: There are two ways to say a generation "spends the most," and they produce different winners.

The most useful public record of American pet spending by generation is not produced directly by the government. It is Pet Business Professor's annual analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure data.

Two bits of plumbing worth knowing before the table, because they explain most of the arguments people have about these numbers.

The BLS does not count households. It counts consumer units, which are usually households but can also be financially independent people sharing an address. And it sorts each one into a generation using the age of the reference person, which is not a "head of household" in any official sense. It is generally just whoever the respondent names first as owning or renting the place.

The series covers every data year since 2016. Its latest edition came out in March of this year and covers spending during 2024, which means the freshest public generational spending data the industry has describes a year that ended roughly 19 months ago.

One note before the numbers. Gen Z only appears from 2019, when Pet Business Professor judged it to finally have enough independent consumer units to report on its own, so the 2016 to 2018 Millennial figures still contain its oldest members.

Read it end to end and the lead changes hands repeatedly.

Boomers added $137.82 per consumer unit in 2017 and gave back $132.91 of it the following year. Gen Z climbed from $271.27 in 2021 to $658.29 in 2023, then dropped about $144 in 2024. Gen X was nearly flat in 2023, up 1.3% while pet inflation ran 8.0%, before adding $133.10 in 2024.

Here is where most of the confusion starts. There are two ways to say a generation spends the most, and they do not always crown the same winner.

The first is total dollars, meaning everything spent by every consumer unit in that generation, added up. That measure is heavily influenced by how many consumer units a generation has, though not decided by it. Boomers had the most consumer units all the way through, which helped them lead total spending from 2016 through 2020 and again in 2023. But size alone did not save them in 2024, when their average dropped sharply enough to knock them to third.

The second is spending per consumer unit, which is roughly how hard the average household in that generation goes. Gen X led that measure in 2018, 2019 and every year from 2021 through 2024, which is six of the nine data years available. There is no 2025 reading yet, so the record stops at 2024.

Across those nine years the two measures crowned different winners three times, in 2018, 2019 and 2023. Each time it was the same split: Boomers generated the most total dollars while Gen X spent the most per household. Which is why "this generation spends the most on pets" is an unfinished sentence until it says whether it means the most in aggregate or the most per household.

TL;DR: Gen X households spend more on pets than their share of the country would predict, and have every year the data covers.

Pet Business Professor also publishes a performance index. It compares a generation's share of all pet dollars to its share of all consumer units. Above 100 means that generation produces more pet spending than its size alone would explain. Below 100 means less.

By our count, Gen X has been above 100 in every year of the series, 2016 through 2024. Nine for nine, in a range of roughly 103 to 127, across a pandemic, a spending boom and a stretch of steep pet inflation. Millennials crossed above 100 for the first time in 2023 and held at 102.7 in 2024. Boomers slipped below it in 2024, to 92.2, for the first time in the series. One caveat, the 2020 figure is reconstructed from the following year's published changes, because no standalone 2020 edition exists. Every other year is printed.

What makes that more interesting is that Gen X is not a growing group. Counting all American consumer units, not just the ones with pets, Gen X ranks third behind Boomers and Millennials, and it lost roughly 0.6M of them in 2024 alone.

An index is a ratio, so a shrinking group can look good on it without spending an extra dollar. Two plain numbers say that is not what is happening here. Gen X is the only generation to raise its total veterinary spending every single year from 2019 through 2024, going from $7.21B to $13.79B. And in 2024 Gen X spent more than any other generation on supplies, on non-veterinary services, and on veterinary care, finishing second only in food.

Food is the bill you cannot skip. Veterinary care is the one plenty of households do skip, or put off, when money is tight. Gen X has been paying it, and paying more of it, for six years running.

That is not the same as going to the vet most often. A Rover survey of 1,000 US pet parents this February found 71% of Gen Z and 69% of Millennials go a few times a year or whenever something seems off, against 57% of Gen X and 52% of Boomers. So the younger cohorts go more, and Gen X spends more. That combination points toward older animals and bigger individual bills rather than more attentive care.

TL;DR: One set averages across everybody. The other averages across pet owners only. Do not compare them directly.

There is a second, more widely quoted set of figures. In its October 2024 State of Pets report, the Harris Poll put average annual spending among pet owners at $4,366, with Gen Z highest at $6,103 and Boomers lowest at $2,454. Those four numbers have travelled a long way. Statista carries them, and The Independent built a piece around them in June.

They remain Harris's most recent published annual dollar comparison. Harris fielded a new State of Pets survey in April 2026 among 2,070 adults and published it in July, and its public findings describe category participation, meaning the share of owners buying toys or insurance or medication, rather than a new annual spending average.

Put those figures next to the Consumer Expenditure table and they look like a flat contradiction. One has Gen X on top at $1,102.84. The other has Gen Z on top at nearly six times that.

The biggest difference is the denominator. Consumer Expenditure averages across every consumer unit, including the ones with no animals. Harris averages only across adults who own pets. But the unit of analysis differs too. Harris measures spending by individual owner, on all of that person's animals collectively, so a two-adult pet-owning home can produce two Harris responses and one Consumer Expenditure record. The collection methods and category definitions are different as well.

The construction matters too. Harris builds its annual figure by asking owners what they spend in an average month across ten categories, excluding any item-level answer outside a $0 to $1,000 range, and annualizing the result.

Here is the trap that follows. It is tempting to multiply Harris's $4,366 by the 95M pet-owning households APPA counts and call it a market size. Do it and you get roughly $415B, against APPA's actual $158B. The answer is not wrong math, it is wrong units, because one figure counts individual owners and the other counts households. Worth remembering the next time a per-owner survey average gets pressed into service as a category estimate.

TL;DR: Higher pet spending clusters around income, homeownership and established households. Those things sit in Gen X right now, but the data cannot prove the birth year is what is doing the work.

Nothing here shows that being born between 1965 and 1980 makes a person spend more on animals. Pet Business Professor's own analysis keeps pointing at other variables. Homeowners generated 79.6% of pet spending in 2023 while making up 65.1% of consumer units, and two-earner households consistently spend the most of any earner group.

No published version of this analysis holds income, homeownership, household size and children constant to isolate birth year, because these are cross-tabs rather than statistical models. So the numbers can tell us Gen X spends more. They cannot tell us whether the birth year is the reason, or just the thing that happens to travel with a paid-off mortgage and two incomes.

A much larger dataset shows the same household characteristics clustering around pet ownership, though it also cannot say which of them drives the spending. Morning Consult Intelligence ran continuous surveys through all of 2025, drawing on more than 1.5M adult responses, and found pet owners are more likely than the general population to be married, to own their homes, and to have children under 18 at home. Dog owners are homeowners at 61% and cat owners at 59%, against 54% of all respondents. Its own conclusion is that pet ownership "appears more often to be an extension of" family life rather than a substitute for it, which is worth setting beside the pets-over-children framing that has carried most of this summer's coverage.

The generational boundaries are soft too, and this is the part that should give anyone pause. Different research firms draw the lines in different places. Packaged Facts, the market research firm, dates the Gen X to Millennial break at 1977, tying it to the consumer technology launches of that year. The Consumer Expenditure analysis uses the more common 1981. Those people were 44 to 47 years old in 2024. Move four birth years between columns and the ranking moves, without a single consumer changing behavior.

So the honest read is a hypothesis rather than a finding. Higher pet spending clusters around income, homeownership, multiple earners and established households, and those characteristics are concentrated in Gen X at the moment. The data cannot prove that is the cause, and it cannot tell us whether Millennials will spend the same way as they reach the same stage. But it does suggest household stage may be the more durable segmentation than the generation label by itself.

TL;DR: Millennials are growing faster than Gen X and Gen Z is growing fastest of all, and the argument for chasing them does not rest on today's spending.

Millennials, not Gen X, posted the largest increase in aggregate pet spending from 2020 through 2024, adding $16.20B against Gen X's $15.92B in the same Consumer Expenditure analysis. They also increased their aggregate spending every year from 2016 through 2024, a cleaner record than Gen X's, which includes a decline in 2020 and a near-flat 2023.

Gen Z's ownership growth is genuinely fast. APPA credits Gen Z and Millennials with driving cat growth and puts them alongside Gen X on dogs, and its fuller reporting puts Gen Z pet-owning households at 18.8M in 2024, up 43.5% in a year, with 70% of them owning more than one animal. Packaged Facts puts Gen Z at $15B of the 2024 pet market against the $5.66B the Consumer Expenditure analysis assigns them, which is less a contradiction than a reminder that how you define the market moves these numbers as much as behavior does.

Then there is an argument that has nothing to do with dollars. Packaged Facts found in January that only 41% of Gen Z pet owners name veterinarians among their most important sources of pet care information, against 72% of Boomers. Among the same group, 44% highly value non-medical service providers collectively, meaning groomers, boarders, daycare providers and trainers taken together, slightly above the share who highly value vets. That is not one groomer outranking one vet. It is a generation spreading its trust across a wider bench, and it could move where category authority sits.

These are different bets on different clocks. Gen Z is a bet on where the category is going. Gen X is the household paying the veterinary bill this quarter.

TL;DR: This is a thought piece, not a plan. The next set of numbers starts arriving October 29, and it will need careful handling.

None of this is a plan. The freshest generational spending data in the industry describes 2024, and the household behavior it captures is about 1.5 years old. What it is good for is knowing which direction to look, and when the next reading lands.

That has a date, with one wrinkle. BLS has scheduled the 2025 Consumer Expenditure release for October 29. That is the raw material, not the generational ranking. Pet Business Professor has to process the microdata afterward, so the cut we actually care about follows some months later.

The 2025 edition will need extra care. Consumer Expenditure collection stopped in October and November during the lapse in appropriations. BLS will adjust the weights on its own published annual estimates, but it plans to release the public microdata unadjusted, leaving analysts to apply the missing-data factors themselves. Since Pet Business Professor rebuilds the generational cut from exactly that microdata, how it handles those two missing months will matter for whether next year's numbers can be compared cleanly to this year's.

In the meantime the pressure is not in the aisle. June 2026 consumer price data puts pet food up 1.3% YoY and the purchase of pets, supplies and accessories up 0.9%, against 6.3% for non-veterinary pet services and 5.1% for veterinary services. The heaviest inflation is landing in services and veterinary care, which is where Gen X finished first in 2024 and where its veterinary spending has risen every year since 2019. It is also, for what one household is worth, the part my brother has already moved out of the clinic and into his driveway.

Whether that household keeps paying it is the thing to look for once the next numbers land.