US Services Revenue Rises 1.1% in Q1 2026, Revised Up From Advance

U.S. selected services revenue reached $6,223.1 billion in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 1.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2025 and 6.5 percent above the first quarter of 2025. The figure lands above the Census Bureau's advance print, which put the quarterly gain at 0.9 percent — a modest upward revision, but one that now carries the full survey response set behind it rather than the partial sample the advance estimate rests on.

That distinction matters more than the size of the revision. The Quarterly Services Survey is the primary source the Bureau of Economic Analysis draws on to build the PCE services component of GDP, and the advance print is what feeds the earliest GDP vintages. When the complete report moves the number, it moves the input underneath estimates that have already been published.

Advance-to-Full Revisions

The headline moved up — the fourth-quarter-2025 to first-quarter-2026 percentage change went from the advance estimate of 0.9 percent to 1.1 percent. The direction is the informative part — the advance sample understated services growth rather than overstating it.

Only one other sector carries an explicit advance-to-full comparison in this release, and it is a non-event: finance and insurance was not revised from its advance estimate of -0.4 percent. That is worth stating plainly, because the rest of the release's revision language is easy to misread. The remaining sector paragraphs revise the third-quarter-2025 to fourth-quarter-2025 change — the prior quarter — not the first-quarter print. Health care's Q3-to-Q4 change moved down, information's moved up, professional services' moved up, and arts and entertainment's moved down. None of those are revisions to the quarter this report is about.

In practical terms, the advance-to-full revision story for Q1 2026 is confined to the total, and it points up.

The Sector Picture

• Health care and social assistance: $1,107.1 billion, up 0.4 percent on the quarter and 6.3 percent on the year
• Information: $683.6 billion, up 2.8 percent on the quarter and 9.3 percent on the year
• Professional, scientific, and technical services: $805.0 billion, up 1.0 percent on the quarter and 6.5 percent on the year
• Arts, entertainment, and recreation: $112.5 billion, up 1.1 percent on the quarter and 4.3 percent on the year

One qualification governs how much weight each of those quarterly moves can carry. The Census Bureau marks health care, professional services, and arts and entertainment as changes whose 90 percent confidence interval includes zero — there is insufficient evidence to conclude the actual change differs from zero. Information's 2.8 percent gain carries no such mark, and neither does the 1.1 percent total. On a strict reading, information is the only sector in this group that measurably grew.

That makes information the quarter's story rather than merely its leader. Its 2.8 percent quarterly gain is the largest quarterly increase since April 2021, and its 9.3 percent annual pace is the fastest of the four tracked here — comfortably ahead of professional services at 6.5 percent, health care at 6.3 percent, and arts and entertainment at 4.3 percent. A sector that spent the prior two years grinding out steady growth has stepped up, and it did so with a confidence interval tight enough to believe.

Health care is the number that matters most for what comes next. At 0.4 percent it turned in the softest quarterly gain of the four, even as annual growth held at 6.3 percent. Health care has been the sector reliably carrying services spending, and at $1,107.1 billion it is by far the largest of the four — large enough that a flat quarter is difficult for the others to offset, and large enough that the ambiguity in its confidence interval is itself consequential.

Professional services rose 1.0 percent and arts and entertainment 1.1 percent, both inside the band where the Bureau will not assert a change occurred. Read the arts and entertainment line as the more informative of the two: discretionary leisure is the first thing households cut when budgets tighten, and it did not contract. That is a quiet argument against acute consumer strain, though not evidence of strength.

Outside the four, utilities revenue of $225.5 billion rose 4.8 percent.

What It Means for GDP

The chain runs in one direction. The advance QSS feeds the BEA's earlier GDP vintages, and this report revises that input upward. A services-revenue print revised from 0.9 percent to 1.1 percent is a modest tailwind to the PCE services line, and to the extent a published GDP estimate was built on the advance figure, it was built on a number that has since been marked up rather than down.

The offsetting consideration is composition. The upward revision to the total sits alongside health care's 0.4 percent quarter, and health care is the heaviest of the sectors tracked here. An aggregate revised up while its largest component stalls is a different quality of strength than one driven by broad-based acceleration — particularly when three of the four sector moves cannot be statistically distinguished from zero. Information is doing the visible work in that total.

For anyone tracking the next GDP revision, the direction of the services input is now settled and modestly positive, while the composition beneath it is narrower than the headline suggests.

The Multi-Quarter Trend

Services growth reaccelerated this quarter. The fourth quarter of 2025 came in at 0.8 percent on revenue of $6,158.3 billion; the first quarter of 2026 lifted that to 1.1 percent. The quarterly growth rate rose 0.3 percentage points — a step up in cadence rather than noise around a flat trend.

Set against the longer record, the current pace is unremarkable in the best sense. Quarterly gains have moved within a narrow band for two years, and the 6.5 percent annual rate sits close to where the series has been running. This is a services sector expanding steadily, without the volatility of the early-decade quarters and without evidence of either a stall or an overheat.

The next Quarterly Services Survey lands on August 20, 2026, with the advance estimate for the second quarter. Two figures will settle what this report leaves open: whether information holds anywhere near its 2.8 percent pace or gives back a quarter that increasingly looks like a one-off, and whether health care's 0.4 percent was a single soft quarter or the first print of a slower trend. The second question matters more — health care's size means its trajectory, not information's, determines where services revenue goes from here.