Advance Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MARTS)

MARTS is the name under which Census publishes its advance monthly estimates - Advance Monthly Sales for Retail and Food Services. It arrives before the complete MRTS tabulation and is later reconciled into those fuller estimates, so the same month exists in two official versions.

The cataloged records pair the two programs by name: the apparel-retail cut carries the 'US Census Monthly Retail Trade Survey (MRTS)' record, and automotive-retail carries 'U.S. Census Monthly Retail Trade Survey - Motor Vehicle and Parts Dealers'. Both draw on the same advance release cycle, sliced to their kind-of-business detail.

Timing is the product. An advance print landing mid-month - roughly five weeks after the reference month - is the earliest official demand signal available, which is why markets move on it. The USD 763.6 billion July 2026 total released on 14 August 2026 shows the scale being estimated on a two-week turnaround.

That speed costs precision: every MARTS value is provisional until reconciliation into MRTS. A vendor feed that republishes advance numbers as final introduces silent restatements. Buyers should require vintage tagging, and treat any paid product as failing if it cannot reproduce both the 14 August advance and the later revised figure for the same month.

1. Confirm the release lag. Advances land mid-month, roughly five weeks after the reference month; the July 2026 print appearing Friday 14 August 2026 is your calibration point.

1. Require both vintages. Reconciliation into MRTS means the advance value changes - a source storing only one version loses the audit trail.

1. Match kind-of-business depth. The Motor Vehicle and Parts Dealers record shows MARTS detail extends to specific retailer groups; generic national totals alone are a red flag.

1. Trace delivery lineage. Whether via workbook download or the EITS timeseries API, values should trace cleanly back to the named Census program.

• census-eits-timeseries-api - the API family serving these time series programmatically.
• monthly-retail-trade-survey - the full survey MARTS advances feed into.

Retail-sector pages using MARTS sit under apparel-retail data and automotive-retail data.