There is no single holiday spirit. The latest data shows tequila leading one occasion, whiskey gaining on it, vodka still holding the largest share of the overall market, and prepared cocktails growing while most other categories contract.
Different categories lead in different contexts, and the context matters as much as the number. Bar volume on Thanksgiving Eve, full-year supplier revenue, four-week retail scans and state-level annual case sales each measure something different.
Together, the latest data shows how holiday drinking shifts by occasion while sitting within a broader spirits market that is changing in different ways.
Key Highlights
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Tequila and other agave spirits took 28.5% of spirits volume on Thanksgiving Eve 2025, the largest category share in BeerBoard's on-premise data.
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Whiskey ranked second at 24.6% and was the one leading category growing, up 4.2% year over year, while agave volume fell 4.6% despite the bigger share.
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Vodka remains America's largest spirits category by supplier revenue at $7.0 billion, ahead of tequila/mezcal at $6.4 billion and American whiskey at $5.1 billion, per the latest full-year figures.
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Premixed cocktails and spirits RTDs grew 16.4% to $3.8 billion, the strongest performance of any major category in an otherwise soft market.
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64% of active consumers planned to celebrate Christmas 2025 in bars or restaurants, five percentage points higher than 2024.
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Half of consumers planned to go out for Thanksgiving, and half again for New Year's Eve, though New Year's Eve skewed toward shots, sparkling wine and Champagne.
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36% of shoppers planned to give alcohol as a holiday gift in a 2025 survey of 1,010 consumers.
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Across the four weeks through December 20, 2025, whiskey dollar sales fell 10.7%, tequila 9.1% and vodka 7.0% year over year, while prepared cocktails grew 4.5%.
Tequila Leads Thanksgiving Eve, but Whiskey Is Gaining
The most recent Thanksgiving Eve data, from BeerBoard's 2025 on-premise tracking, gives the clearest category snapshot of a major U.S. holiday drinking occasion.
Agave spirits, overwhelmingly tequila, took 28.5% of liquor volume, essentially flat against their 28.3% share in 2024. Share held, but total agave volume dropped 4.6% year over year, so tequila kept its lead in a smaller pool rather than expanding.
Whiskey moved the other way. It came second at 24.6% of volume, up from 22.4%, and grew in absolute terms as well, rising 4.2%. The night's most popular cocktails were margaritas, martinis and highballs.
One caveat matters here: this measures on-premise sales through venues BeerBoard covers, not retail bottle purchases. It describes what Americans drank out that night, not what they carried home from a liquor store.
Holiday Preferences Shift by Occasion
The most recent U.S. holiday research from NIQ, fielded in October 2025, makes a point that gets flattened whenever "the holidays" are treated as one occasion. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve produce different drinking patterns.
Around Thanksgiving, 50% of active consumers planned to visit bars or restaurants, with beer, table wine and cocktails leading and sparkling wine picking up interest.
Christmas drew the highest planned on-premise participation of the period, at 64%, up five percentage points year over year. Roughly two in five employed consumers also expected to attend an organized work Christmas event, where beer stayed the leading alcoholic choice and table wine became more prominent.
New Year's Eve had a different shape again. Half of consumers planned to go out, and NIQ reported heightened interest in shots, sparkling wine and Champagne rather than the beer-and-wine pattern of the earlier holidays.
These are on-premise intentions, not a ranking of which bottles people buy.
Vodka Is Still the Largest Category by Revenue
The latest full-year figures from the Distilled Spirits Council, covering 2025, give the national baseline. This is broader market context rather than holiday purchasing, but it explains which categories dominate shelf space in December.
By supplier revenue, the five largest categories are vodka at $7.0 billion, tequila/mezcal at $6.4 billion, American whiskey at $5.1 billion, premixed cocktails and spirits RTDs at $3.8 billion, and cordials at $2.7 billion.
Vodka's lead is real but narrower than it once looked, with tequila and mezcal now within roughly $600 million of it.
Momentum, though, sits in specific segments rather than across whole categories. WSWA's SipSource analysis ahead of the 2025 holidays called tequila the strongest-performing core spirit and pointed to 12.4% reposado volume growth over the prior 12 months, while noting that premium-priced bourbon remained well positioned for gifting even with the broader bourbon market flat.
RTDs Are the Strongest Growth Category
Prepared cocktails are the clearest exception to a soft market. Supplier revenue rose 16.4% to $3.8 billion, and that strength carried into the holiday weeks while traditional categories declined.
Across the four weeks through December 20, 2025, NIQ retail data showed prepared cocktail dollar sales up 4.5%, with vodka down 7.0%, tequila down 9.1% and whiskey down 10.7% against the same period in 2024.
Christmas week through December 27 repeated the pattern. Prepared cocktails grew 4.9% while vodka fell 6.4%, tequila 8.4% and whiskey 9.1%.
Worth being precise: RTDs grow fastest, but they are not the biggest part of the spirits business. At $3.8 billion in supplier revenue they remain roughly half the size of vodka, and the traditional categories are still the larger commercial base underneath those declines.
Alcohol Remains a Significant Gifting Category
Holiday demand is not only about what gets poured at gatherings. Salsify's 2025 Holiday Pulse survey of 1,010 consumers found 36% planned to buy alcohol as a gift, behind fashion, personal care, electronics and food but ahead of several other common categories.
Numerator's 2025 Holiday Preview, based on 5,149 consumers, found food and alcohol were the top two categories people planned to purchase across the year's celebrations. For New Year's Eve specifically, 51% of intended celebrators planned to buy alcohol, second only to food.
Older Numerator research offers historical background rather than a read on current behavior: it found 64% of U.S. households bought alcohol across November and December, spending an average $102, with 60.6% of holiday alcohol buyers purchasing it as a gift.
Where Each Category Is Strongest Geographically
State-level data adds context, with one important limit: the latest available figures cover full-year 2024 consumption, not Thanksgiving or Christmas. They show where categories are strongest across the year, not where holiday buying concentrates.
By total case volume, California led all three major categories in 2024: roughly 6.6 million nine-liter cases of tequila, more than 3.7 million of American whiskey and about 8.6 million of vodka. Texas and Florida ranked among the largest markets in all three, which mostly reflects population.
Per-capita figures tell a more interesting story, since they measure concentration rather than size. Nevada led tequila at 286 cases per 1,000 residents, Kentucky led American whiskey at 272, and New Hampshire led vodka at 681.
The two measures answer different questions. Total volume shows where the largest markets are; per capita shows where a category runs deepest in local drinking habits.
Holiday Spending Faces Real Pressure
All of this sits inside a softer overall market. WSWA reported U.S. spirits volumes down 5.9% and revenue down 5.1% through the first nine months of 2025, and NIQ found that among households actively trying to save money, 25% planned to reduce or cut alcohol from their Thanksgiving celebrations.
Volume itself held up in the alcohol-control states, where NABCA recorded a 0.4% December year-over-year increase and more than 6.0 million nine-liter cases, though shelf-dollar volume of roughly $1.40 billion was down 1.4%. That volume gain came partly from additional selling days in several states, so it is not evidence of underlying growth on its own. Full-year control-state volumes were down 1.4%.
That pressure is why category differences matter more than usual. Declining dollar sales do not make whiskey, tequila or vodka commercially unimportant during the holidays; growth is simply coming from narrower segments such as reposado tequila and prepared cocktails rather than from the whole market rising together.
What the Data Shows
Tequila holds the largest share of spirits volume on the biggest measured drinking night, whiskey is the category gaining on it, and vodka still generates the most revenue nationally across the full year. Those three facts are not in conflict, because they measure different things.
Occasion drives much of the variation. Beer, wine and cocktails carry Thanksgiving and Christmas, while New Year's Eve pulls toward shots and sparkling wine, a shift in format as much as in category.
The growth picture and the volume picture also point in different directions. Prepared cocktails are the only major spirits category clearly expanding, while whiskey, tequila and vodka are larger, softer and still doing most of the work.
Geography sits at the edge of that story rather than its center. California leads on total volume because California is large; Nevada, Kentucky and New Hampshire lead per capita because those categories run deeper there. Neither tells you what sells at Christmas.
The most recent complete holiday and market figures come from 2025, and they describe demand that is broad, occasion-specific and under real financial pressure, with no single category winning across every measure.
