There’s a name for what’s happening to your camera gear, your climbing rack, your record collection: funflation, and CNBC put real numbers on it this week. Bank of America card data shows spending on hobbies rose 7.9% in August compared to a year earlier. Transaction counts, meaning the actual number of purchases, rose just 3.4% over the same stretch. Do the subtraction and you get the uncomfortable part: people aren’t just buying hobby stuff more often. They’re paying more per purchase, and they’re doing it anyway.

That’s not a rounding error. It’s roughly double the pace of the category it’s supposed to track. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ recreation index, which covers video and audio equipment, pets, sporting goods, photography, and recreational reading, rose 2.7% in the 12 months through August. Hobby spending is outrunning hobby-category inflation by close to three to one. Something besides sticker prices is pushing the number up, and it’s worth understanding before you set your own budget for the rest of the year.

Quick Verdict

Hobby spending growth, Aug 2026 YoY	7.9% — Bank of America card data, via CNBC
Hobby transaction growth, same period	3.4% — spending outpacing purchase frequency roughly 2-to-1
BLS recreation CPI, 12 months through Aug 2026	2.7% — BLS
Sporting goods/hobby/instrument/book store sales, 12 months through Aug	10.7% — U.S. Census Bureau
Total U.S. retail & food-services sales, same period	6.0% — Census
What’s driving it	Consumers shifting dollars from pricier travel to home-based, local hobbies — not cutting discretionary spending outright
What to actually do	Give your hobby category a real budget line instead of letting it live inside “miscellaneous”

What Is Funflation?

Funflation is the pattern of leisure and hobby spending rising faster than the general inflation rate for recreation, as consumers keep spending on fun even as it gets more expensive. University of Nottingham economics professor John Gathergood, who’s tracked the phenomenon, describes it as showing up everywhere from “gas for weekend cars to ice creams on holiday.” The 2026 version is specific: hobby-category dollars up 7.9%, the CPI measure of the same category up 2.7%. The gap is the story.

The Numbers Behind Funflation, Broken Down

Three separate data sets are pointing at the same thing this month, and they’re not measuring identical baskets, which is exactly why the overlap matters.

Bank of America’s card data — a read on actual consumer transactions across arts and crafts, hobby shops, and gear retailers selling skiing, hiking, camping, and scuba equipment — found the 7.9%-versus-3.4% gap. That’s a spending-behavior number: real dollars moving out of real accounts.

The BLS recreation CPI is a prices number. It tracks how much more the same basket of goods costs this year versus last, and it landed at 2.7% for the 12 months through August. If hobby spending were rising only because things cost more, the two numbers would move together. They’re not. People are buying more expensive gear, buying it more often per transaction, or both.

The Census Bureau’s advance retail sales data backs up the shift on the supply side. Sales at sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument, and book stores rose 10.7% in the 12 months through August, against 6.0% growth for total U.S. retail and food-services sales in the same window. Hobby-adjacent retail isn’t just keeping pace with the broader economy. It’s growing at nearly double the rate.

Why Hobbies, Why Now

The travel connection is the part that makes this make sense instead of just being a weird statistic. Jet fuel prices have climbed sharply this year, tied to the U.S.-Iran conflict rattling oil markets, and airlines have passed those costs straight through to ticket prices. Bank of America’s analysts told CNBC that the hobby spending surge looks connected to “a shift away from travel due to higher prices from rising fuel costs.” Consumers aren’t giving up on leisure. They’re trading a $1,200 flight for a $300 camera lens, a new bike, or a season of pottery classes that don’t require a boarding pass.

That’s the useful reframe here. This isn’t reckless overspending — it’s reallocation. Money that would’ve gone to airfare and hotels is landing in home-based and local hobbies instead, which is a defensible trade-off if you’re doing it on purpose. It’s a much worse one if it happens by accident and shows up as a surprised look at your statement in October.

The generational split adds texture. Bank of America’s data shows older millennials spending more than double per person on hobbies compared to Gen Z, who are leaning toward cheaper pastimes — board games, arts and crafts, knitting and baking, the stuff online communities have started calling “granny core.” Which tells you funflation isn’t hitting every household the same way. It’s concentrated wherever there’s disposable income that used to go toward a plane ticket.

How Do You Budget for a Category That’s Growing 7.9% a Year?

The honest answer: the same way you’d budget for anything else that’s gotten more expensive without your permission. Give it a real number instead of letting it hide.

1. Name the category. “Hobbies” has to be its own line, separate from “shopping” or “entertainment.” If it’s buried in miscellaneous spending, you can’t see it growing until the pattern is already three months old.
2. Set the number from last month’s actual spending, not a guess. Pull your last two or three statements and add up what actually went to hobby purchases — gear, classes, subscriptions, supplies. Most people underestimate this by a wide margin because it’s spread across a dozen small charges instead of one big one.
3. Decide if the growth is a trade-off you’re making or one that’s happening to you. If you skipped a trip this year and redirected that money into a hobby, that’s a choice — budget for it accordingly. If your hobby spending crept up while your travel spending also stayed the same, that’s not a trade-off. That’s just more spending.
4. Use a spendable-cash number, not a category cap. A hard monthly limit on “hobbies” gets abandoned the first time a good deal shows up. A running safe-to-spend number that accounts for the rest of your budget is harder to blow past without noticing.
5. Revisit it seasonally. Hobby spending isn’t flat across the year — ski gear in November, garden supplies in April, camping equipment in June. A number set once in January won’t hold for December.

The Apps That Actually Handle Discretionary Spending

Most budgeting apps are built around bills, groceries, and rent — the fixed and semi-fixed stuff. Hobby spending is discretionary, irregular, and easy to under-track, which means the tool matters more than usual here.

PocketGuard’s “In My Pocket” number is a solid fit for exactly this problem. It calculates what you can actually spend after bills and budget commitments are accounted for, which means a hobby purchase shows up against real available cash instead of an arbitrary monthly cap you set three months ago and forgot to adjust.

If you’d rather assign every dollar ahead of time, YNAB’s category-based system works well for hobby budgeting specifically because it forces you to fund the category before you spend from it — the same sinking-fund logic that works for irregular expenses like vacation costs applies just as well to a new set of golf clubs or a quarter’s worth of climbing gym visits.

And if the honest problem is that there’s no room in the budget for a bigger hobby line without finding money somewhere else, a subscription audit is still the fastest place to look. The average household is paying for forgotten streaming add-ons and app trials that never got canceled — money that could fund an actual hobby instead of quietly disappearing into a service nobody’s opened in months. Once you know what’s freed up, automating a transfer into a dedicated hobby fund turns “I should budget for this” into something that happens without a monthly decision.

What This Means for Your Budget This Fall

Funflation isn’t a reason to feel bad about a hobby getting more expensive. It’s a reason to stop treating hobby spending like it’s small enough to ignore. A category growing at 7.9% a year compounds fast — the same way any expense does when nobody’s watching it closely. Two years of that pace and a hobby that cost $150 a month is closer to $175. Nobody decided that. It just happened, one slightly-pricier purchase at a time.

The travel-to-hobby swap driving a chunk of this growth is, for a lot of people, a genuinely reasonable response to jet fuel prices that aren’t coming down fast. But a reasonable trade-off still needs a number attached to it. Otherwise “we’re not traveling this year” quietly turns into “we’re spending about the same amount, just on different things” — which isn’t the win it sounds like if the point was actually to save money.

The Bottom Line

Hobby spending grew 7.9% in the year through August while transaction counts grew 3.4% and recreation prices rose only 2.7%, according to Bank of America’s card data and BLS figures reported by CNBC. That gap is real, it’s driven partly by people swapping expensive travel for cheaper-but-not-cheap hobbies, and it’s not going to show up on your radar unless you put a dedicated line item in front of it. Pull last month’s statement, add up what actually went to hobbies, and decide whether that number reflects a choice you’re making or a habit that crept up on you. Either way, it’s worth knowing before the next statement lands.

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Figures from CNBC’s Sept. 27, 2026 reporting on Bank of America card data, BLS Consumer Price Index, August 2026, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Advance Monthly Retail Trade Report. Verify current figures as new monthly data is released.