Just how big was Dallas World Cup spending boost, anyway? – Dallas News

A new report from Bank of America offers one indication: a roughly 3.75% year-over-year overall local spending boost for the duration of the tournament.  

“I do think that the true economic benefit came from attracting visitors,” said Taylor Bowley, an economist at Bank of America Institute who worked on the report. “It’s the fans that travel that really introduce new dollars into these host cities like Dallas, that really benefited local restaurants and other hospitality businesses.” 

‘Temporary boosts’

To that effect, Bank of America’s report also measured the tournament’s impact on “consumer-facing small businesses” in American host cities, a category that includes bars, restaurants and hotels, and found that Dallas had a roughly 11% year-over-year sales income bump in the category in June, when North Texas hosted six games. In July, when the region hosted three games, the region saw around a 2% year-over-year bump.

“Those temporary boosts,” added Bowley, “especially [for] small businesses that operate on relatively thin profit margins — those can go a long way.”  

The report’s authors determined host cities’ overall spending increases by measuring localized card spending by Bank of America customers compared with their spending for the same period in 2025. They measured the boost to small businesses by analyzing sales revenue for Bank of America small business clients, generally defining the category as businesses with less than $5 million in annual sales revenue. 

Bank of America’s data is not meant to be comprehensive, the report notes — the overall spending increases did not capture international tourists’ spending, because they’re not Bank of America customers — and the report’s numbers were also influenced by factors beyond the World Cup. Philadelphia, for example, recorded a larger small-business increase in July, when the city hosted one game, than it did in June, when it hosted five — but the city was also a major destination for the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations, Bowley noted. 

Still, the bank’s report offers among the first quantitative analyses offering at least some insight into the real economic impact of the World Cup for the tournament’s 11 U.S. host cities. The economic impact question is particularly significant because the tournament — which was widely considered a massive on-field success — was also largely defined by various economic controversies. Some of which included record high ticket prices and strict contract stipulations that meant FIFA received the vast majority of the tournament’s revenue from everything from media rights to concessions even as host cities were required to assume financial liability and cover costs for expenses ranging from security and traffic management to stadium retrofitting. 

‘Modest bump’

For those reasons, Chicago ended up declining to host altogether.

“I was not gonna allow taxpayers of the city of Chicago to be dumb money,” Rahm Emanuel, the city’s mayor at the time, told the media. “They assumed that we were gonna take all the risk, and they were gonna get all the reward. I told them to take a hike.” 

Three states that hosted games, Missouri, Georgia and Florida, also waived taxes on ticket sales, which amounted to tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue, while U.S. taxpayers ended up paying billions in direct and indirect subsidies to host cities and states. Following the tournament, FIFA reported a record $15 billion revenue but has reportedly stalled on verbal promises to pay U.S. host cities $1 million each. 

And while ahead of the games both FIFA and the White House issued promises about the tournament’s overall return for the U.S. economy, projecting a boost of over $30 billion, analysts have long said the figure is inflated.  

“It’s a modest bump,” Barbara Denham, an economist at Oxford Economics who authored a World Cup economic impact report, told The Dallas Morning News earlier this year. Denham highlighted a positive short-term tourism and hospitality effect, but relatively little longer-term impact, especially because the tournament involved few major infrastructure investments. “It’s not as significant as people think,” she added.

Card spending

Bank of America’s report generally backs up the short-term bump projection: Overall, it found the 11 U.S. host cities saw a roughly 5% year-over-year bump in card spending, which Bowley characterized as significant. “I would say that for host cities, it’s quite a big boost,” she said. 

The bank’s report also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that tourists increased their spending far more than residents did, with nonlocal Bank of America customers who traveled to host cities bumping up their spending by more than 17%. The data also showed younger people recorded higher spending increases than older people, and the increases were well-distributed among income groups.  

Yet the card spending increases did vary significantly among the 11 U.S. host cities: Kansas City, which saw the biggest gain, recorded a 7% year-over-year bump, while Houston, which saw the smallest gain, recorded a spending increase of around 2.5%. 

Dallas’ roughly 3.75% boost ranked along with Seattle as the sixth-highest. Bowley emphasized that the middle-of-the-pack boost likely comes in part from North Texas’ relatively large economy — it’s easier to move the spending needle in Kansas City — but that the real winners, in any case, were area small businesses, for which even a relatively short-term spending boost can mean a lasting benefit. North Texas had plenty. 

“We tried to prepare as much as we could,” Carmen Robles, a general manager at a local Lockhart Smokehouse, told The News in July. “It was crazier than we expected.”   

Aug 18, 2026