Retail sales surprised strongly on the upside in April, growing by 7.6% yoy (consensus 3.5%, our forecast 4.0%). The acceleration itself is not a surprise here – the moving date of Easter guaranteed a strong fluctuation in sales here. The surprise is that all other categories turned out to be much stronger than our assumptions and often than seasonal patterns. Let us review the picture of the Polish consumer in the first month of spring.

Retail sales of goods (%yoy)

Source: Statistics Poland, Pekao Research

Firstly, food sales growth accelerated from -9.4% to +9.7% yoy. This is entirely the effect of Easter – in 2024, its date was relatively early (March), in 2025 – relatively late (April 20). This caused a shift in the moment of accumulation of food purchases and the almost 20 percentage points difference in growth of this category - it comfortably fits the historical norm when it comes to such shifts of the dates of this holiday. There were no surprises here.

Secondly, the car and parts market does not want to saturate – in April, sales of this category slowed down minimally, from about 18 to 15% yoy. We expected that the return of the level of vehicle registrations and sales would be the beginning of a significant slowdown in this category and a return to single-digit growth. We have not observed it in 2025 so far and the hypothesis should be considered that the demand deferred from the period of supply tensions is still being met. If so, we may be looking at a period of sales exceeding the multi-year trend.

Thirdly, sales of other durable and semi-durable goods either accelerated or maintained high growth. It is significant that cars, mentioned in the previous point, was the only category in which we did not see an acceleration in April.

Retail sales by category (%yoy)

Source: Statistics Poland, Pekao Research

Is this the beginning of a consumer boom? As always, we recommend calm when it comes to such statements. Although food is the only category for which a statistically significant impact of Easter can be found in historical data – so we shouldn’t blame it for such a good sales reading – we cannot completely rule out the influence of other one-off factors. It has always been good practice to average March and April data in such cases. This time, the result of this operation is 3.7% yoy, which is only slightly better than last year’s average (3.3% yoy). Nevertheless, retail sales reached a multi-year maximum in April (see the chart below) and this is undoubtedly a positive signal. What’s more, the improvement in consumer sentiment (including in particular the current propensity to consume) suggests that such a good sales result is also supported by an improvement in the fundamentals of consumer demand. The most important is the transition from extraordinary saving to quite standard consumption from current income.

Retail sales and household consumption (2019 end = 100%)

Source: Statistics Poland, Pekao Research