What was the impact of the pandemic and energy-food shocks on European consumers’ “everyday spending”?: Insights from a new dataset of monthly card spending for 12 countries and 9 spending categories

European consumers have withstood major shocks since 2019, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the energy and food price shock following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a sharp rise in the overall price level amid tightening of monetary policy. This paper constructs a new high-frequency, granular dataset from aggregated, anonymised transaction-level data from Mastercard. It estimates monthly national and TL2 subnational spending for 12 European countries and 9 COICOP spending categories from 2018 to 2024. The analysis focuses on “everyday spending”, the subset of consumption categories well captured by card payments and closest to households’ lived experience of day-to-day expenditure. Everyday spending recovered after the pandemic but has been subdued since 2022, marking a sharp deceleration relative to pre-2020 trends and has been on a weaker trajectory than suggested by annual national accounts data. Granular monthly data reveal how households adjusted spending across different categories in response to sharp changes in prices and the decline in real incomes. Subnational patterns show that poorer subnational regions experienced a stronger slowdown in everyday spending, consistent with their greater exposure to essential goods such as food and energy. At monthly frequency, increases in nominal incomes are associated with noticeable improvements in real spending.