US retailers held 1.25 months of inventory for every month of sales in June 2026, on a seasonally adjusted basis, according to the Census Bureau’s Manufacturing and Trade Inventories and Sales report released August 14, 2026. That single ratio hides a spread from 0.76 for food and beverage stores to 2.60 for department stores. Translated into annual turns on a sales basis, the retail average is roughly 9.6 turns and the range runs from about 4.6 to about 15.8. Below are the published figures by category, from two named sources, with the arithmetic shown so you can judge your own numbers against them.

Two ways to measure, and why they differ

Inventory turnover is cost of goods sold divided by average inventory. That is the textbook ratio and the one most sellers compute internally. Government statistics do not publish COGS, so the Census Bureau reports an inventories-to-sales ratio instead: end-of-month inventory at cost divided by that month’s sales at retail. Dividing 12 by that ratio gives an approximate sales-basis turn, which will be higher than a COGS-basis turn by roughly the gross margin markup. Keep the two apart when comparing.

The second source below, Aswath Damodaran’s working capital dataset at NYU Stern, reports inventory as a percentage of sales for public companies by sector. Dividing 1 by that percentage gives a sales-basis turn as well.

Census Bureau: retail inventories/sales ratios, June 2026

All figures are seasonally adjusted, preliminary, from Table 3 of the Census Bureau’s Manufacturing and Trade Inventories and Sales report for June 2026 (release CB26-132, August 14, 2026). The June 2025 figure is in parentheses.

• Retail trade, total: 1.25 (1.30). Roughly 9.6 sales-basis turns a year.
• Retail excluding motor vehicles and parts: 1.08 (1.13). About 11.1 turns.
• Clothing and clothing accessory stores: 2.14 (2.19). About 5.6 turns.
• Furniture, home furnishings, electronics and appliance stores: 1.59 (1.57). About 7.5 turns.
• Building materials, garden equipment and supplies: 2.13 (2.08). About 5.6 turns.
• General merchandise stores: 1.24 (1.27). About 9.7 turns.
• Department stores: 2.60 (2.75). About 4.6 turns.
• Food and beverage stores: 0.76 (0.74). About 15.8 turns.
• Motor vehicle and parts dealers: 1.86 (1.89). About 6.5 turns.

The same report puts the total business inventories/sales ratio (manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers combined) at 1.30 for June 2026, down from 1.39 a year earlier. Merchant wholesalers were at 1.19 and manufacturers at 1.48.

Two things to notice. First, the year-over-year direction: retail as a whole got leaner (1.30 to 1.25) while furniture and electronics and building materials got slightly heavier. Second, the categories closest to typical marketplace sellers (apparel, home goods, electronics, general merchandise) sit between 1.24 and 2.14 months of stock, which is 5.6 to 9.7 sales-basis turns. If your COGS-basis turn is 4 on an apparel line, you are roughly in line with the Census clothing-store figure once markup is accounted for. If it is 2, you are carrying twice the sector’s inventory.

NYU Stern (Damodaran): inventory as a percentage of sales, January 2026

Damodaran’s dataset, updated January 2026 and covering 5,994 US firms, reports inventory divided by sales by industry. Selected consumer product sectors, with the implied sales-basis turn:

• Apparel (35 firms): 19.25 percent. About 5.2 turns.
• Furniture and home furnishings (27 firms): 18.29 percent. About 5.5 turns.
• Shoe (11 firms): 16.43 percent. About 6.1 turns.
• Electronics, consumer and office (8 firms): 13.63 percent. About 7.3 turns.
• Recreation (49 firms): 13.71 percent. About 7.3 turns.
• Household products (110 firms): 11.55 percent. About 8.7 turns.
• Healthcare products (204 firms): 17.59 percent. About 5.7 turns.
• Food processing (78 firms): 13.41 percent. About 7.5 turns.
• Retail, special lines (94 firms): 18.76 percent. About 5.3 turns.
• Retail, general (23 firms): 8.67 percent. About 11.5 turns.
• Retail, grocery and food (15 firms): 5.49 percent. About 18.2 turns.
• Total market excluding financials (4,822 firms): 8.99 percent. About 11.1 turns.

The two sources agree more than you might expect. Census clothing stores at 5.6 turns and Damodaran apparel at 5.2; Census furniture and electronics at 7.5 and Damodaran home furnishings at 5.5 and consumer electronics at 7.3; Census general merchandise at 9.7 and Damodaran general retail at 11.5. Public-company data skews toward larger, more efficient operators, which explains most of the gap where there is one.

Translating benchmarks to a marketplace seller

A seller comparing against these figures should adjust for three things.

Markup. Convert your COGS-basis turn to a sales basis before comparing to either source. If your gross margin after COGS is 60 percent, a COGS-basis turn of 4 corresponds to a sales-basis turn of roughly 10, since sales are 2.5 times cost.

FBA and 3PL stock. Include every unit you own, wherever it sits: your warehouse, the 3PL, FBA, in transit. The Census ratio counts inventory owned by the retailer regardless of location. A turn computed on warehouse stock alone will look flattering.

Seasonality. The Census figures are seasonally adjusted. Your own monthly turn will swing; the not-adjusted Census figures for clothing stores, for example, moved from 1.99 in May to 2.22 in June 2026. Compare a trailing twelve months, not a single month.

What a bad number costs

The reason to care is not the ratio itself but what a slow turn does to cash and fees. Every extra month of stock is a month of capital sitting on a shelf, plus storage. On a marketplace, aged inventory attracts surcharges on top of the base storage rate, so a SKU turning at 3 when its category turns at 7 is paying twice: once in tied-up cash and once in fees.

The fix starts with measuring at the SKU level rather than the company level. A company-wide turn of 6 can hide a hero SKU at 14 and a dozen laggards at 2. Tools built for marketplace sellers, ConnectBooks among them, track inventory in real time with COGS per SKU so the turn can be computed product by product; a spreadsheet can do the same if the counts and costs are current. Either way, the benchmark to beat is the category figure above, and the unit of analysis is the SKU.

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Manufacturing and Trade Inventories and Sales, June 2026, release CB26-132, August 14, 2026, Tables 1 and 3, at census.gov/mtis. Aswath Damodaran, Working Capital Ratios by Sector (US), data as of January 2026, at pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar. Turn calculations in this article are the author’s, derived as 12 divided by the Census ratio and 1 divided by the Damodaran percentage.