Australians who bought a Father’s Day gift in 2025 spent $145 on average, and that number is the wrong target: fewer people bought at all, and the ones who did concentrated their spending. Pick the figure from the relationship, not the average.
There is a real answer to this, and it is more interesting than the number on its own.
The Australian Retailers Association and Roy Morgan put 2025 Father’s Day spending at $720 million, down $100 million on the year before. But the average person buying a gift spent $145, which was up almost 44%. Those two facts only reconcile one way: far fewer people bought anything at all. Around 4.7 million Australians, about 20% of Australians aged 14 and over, compared with 36% the year before.
So what is the right number?
If you want the benchmark: $145 is what the average Australian who bought a Father’s Day gift in 2025 spent. A quarter of buyers spent over $200. That is the shape of the market, and it is a reasonable anchor if you have no other information.
But be careful with an average built from a shrinking pool. When the people who are unsure drop out and only the committed remain, the average rises without anything actually getting more expensive. The $145 figure describes the people who definitely bought, not what a gift is worth.
Specific beats expensive, and it is not close
A $28 rub for a dad who cooks steak every Saturday reads better than a $150 gadget that misses, because one of them proves you were paying attention and the other proves you had a budget. Price is what you spend. Fit is what he notices.
The test we use throughout this site: can you say, in one sentence, why this particular item suits this particular person? If you cannot, the money is not the problem.
Where the money actually goes
The 2025 category split was food and alcohol 17%, clothing and shoes 14%, then toiletries and grooming and gift vouchers at 7% each. Tech was 5%. Experiences, car and bike gear, homewares and sporting or camping gear were each about 4%.
Read that as a warning rather than a shopping list. Food, drink and clothing are where everyone goes, which is exactly why those gifts are the hardest to make feel considered. The 4% categories are where a gift is far more likely to be the only one of its kind he opens.
One statistic worth sitting with
About 1.9 million Australians, roughly 8% of the population, said they were buying a Father’s Day gift for someone other than their birth father. A stepdad, a grandfather, an uncle, a father-in-law, a mate who did the job when nobody else would.
That is a very large number of people shopping for a relationship that has no obvious script and no obvious price. If that is you, the useful rule is to buy for the specific thing he did rather than the role he holds, and to keep it under a hundred dollars so it reads as warmth rather than obligation.
The honest caveats on these figures
This is Father’s Day data, not Christmas data, and Christmas budgets behave differently because the gift sits alongside a dozen others. It is national rather than Queensland-specific. And it is survey data on intentions, collected from 2,452 people before the day, which historically runs a little above what people actually spend.
The figures are from the ARA and Roy Morgan release of 27 August 2025. They are the most recent published at the time of writing, and they will be updated here when the next set lands.
