China Approves Consumption Expansion Plan, Targets 60 Trillion RMB Retail Sales

The "Expanding Consumption" 15th Five-Year Plan (hereinafter referred to as the Plan) was recently approved by the State Council. As the first national-level special plan for the consumption sector, the Plan sets targets including a significant increase in the household consumption rate by 2030, relatively rapid growth in total social goods and services consumption, and total retail sales of consumer goods reaching about 60 trillion RMB. Among the key tasks outlined, "promoting service consumption to improve quality and benefit the people" ranks first. China's per capita GDP has exceeded 13,000 US dollars for three consecutive years, and service consumption has entered a phase of rapid growth.

In 2025, China's service retail sales grew 5.5% year-on-year, 1.7 percentage points faster than goods retail sales. The share of per capita service consumption expenditure in total consumption stood at 46.1%, and in first-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, this ratio reached about 60%. In the first half of 2026, service retail sales grew 5.3% year-on-year, significantly higher than the 1.1% growth in goods retail sales, with retail sales of tourism consulting and rental services, as well as cultural and sports leisure services, achieving double-digit growth.

The Plan focuses on addressing shortcomings in elderly care, childcare, cultural tourism, healthcare, and household services, expanding the supply of quality services. From 2020 to 2025, per capita service consumption expenditure grew at an average annual rate of 8.5%. The Plan explicitly sets a target of "steadily increasing the proportion of per capita service consumption expenditure in per capita consumption expenditure" and introduces measures in areas such as expanding high-quality supply, enriching platform carriers, and strengthening support guarantees. The Plan proposes cultivating new consumption formats, models, and scenarios, promoting the integration of artificial intelligence with education, healthcare, culture, tourism, sports, and other fields, and supporting the upgrade of consumption carriers such as key commercial districts and streets into immersive and interactive multi-scenario consumption spaces. Additionally, the Plan dedicates a separate chapter to "enhancing consumption capacity", systematically deploying basic systems for employment, income growth, social security, and public services, and proposes measures such as orderly relaxing access restrictions in the service sector, cleaning up and optimizing unreasonable restrictive measures, and implementing the rest and leave system.