The Ramp Business Spend Nowcast: our newest dataset

Ara Kharazian

Economist, Ramp

In our Summer 2025 Ramp Business Spending Report, we introduced our new flagship dataset: Nowcast, a pulse on American enterprise. The Ramp Business Spending Nowcast is a comprehensive, sector-by-sector and region-by-region view of U.S. business spend in real time.

→ Download the report

Introducing: Nowcast

When we launched the Ramp Economics Lab, our mission was to turn Ramp data into insights that help businesses, policymakers, and the public make better decisions. We knew there was no comprehensive dataset tracking real-time U.S. business spend, despite its size and status as a leading indicator of recessions and other economic trends. We knew Ramp data could fill that gap.

Ours is one of the most differentiated datasets in corporate America. Unlike other public datasets, which are limited to showing aggregate spend, Nowcast shows what businesses are spending on.

With Nowcast, we can spot trends before they even register with the Fed or Bureau of Labor Statistics. We can detect a slowdown before it appears in GDP, watch ad budgets tighten after a rate hike, see wholesalers shore up inventories ahead of tariffs, and track manufacturing capital expenditures in response to policy shifts.

Our methodology is simple. We sample Ramp businesses active over the past two years, weight them by sector, size, and region to match the U.S. business universe, and track their card spend over time. This weighting yields a granular view of how each sector reacts to macroeconomic forces. It is not indicative of Ramp’s business performance.

Summer 2025 Nowcast findings

The economy on aggregate is showing resilience despite economic headwinds. However, Nowcast shows some sectors have fared notably better than others.

Here's the data. Get the complete analysis by downloading the report.

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→ See the full dataset and commentary in the Summer 2025 Ramp Business Spending Report.

Ara Kharazian•Economist, Ramp

Ara Kharazian is an economist at Ramp. His writing and analysis of AI, business spend, and the economy has been covered in the New York Times, NBC News, ABC News, NPR's Planet Money, Bloomberg, the Guardian, Vox, Axios, and more. Ara previously led economic research at Square and developed Square Payroll Index, which became one of the key public datasets used to track restaurant worker wages, tips, and overtime in the United States. He was previously an economic consultant at Cornerstone Research.

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