What Australians spend to say things with flowers, and what that spend is really for.
A bouquet is one of the few things we buy that we never keep. We send it to someone else, we rarely see it arrive, and within a fortnight it is gone. By every rule of sensible spending it should be the first thing we trim. It is not. Across a year of orders, the pattern that comes through is not thrift. It is care, priced.
Over the twelve months to June 2026 we looked at a full year of orders placed with Fig & Bloom. Not a national census, and not a survey of what people say they value: a record of what they actually spent, occasion by occasion, month by month. The average order came to $155, the median $149. Read those two numbers together and you get a quiet story. Most people land in the same considered place. Very few are economising, and very few are showing off.
What the spend changes by is the reason for sending. And that, it turns out, is where the feeling lives.
We pay the most for love and the milestones
The strongest predictor of what someone spends is not the season or the city. It is the occasion.
An anniversary arrangement draws the highest average order of the year, around $175. Romance follows close behind at $169, and a new baby at $168. These are the moments that mark a life rather than a week: the ones we will still be able to date years from now. People reach a little further for them, and they do it consistently enough that the pattern holds across a full year of orders.
Grief and good news sit together in the next band. Sympathy flowers average $163, the same as congratulations. It is a strange pairing on paper and an honest one in practice. The day someone loses a parent and the day a friend lands the job both ask for the same thing: a gesture that meets the size of the moment. A thank you comes in at $162, a birthday arrangement at $160, get well at $158.
The lowest spend is the one with no occasion at all. The everyday flowers, the just because, the thinking of you with nothing attached, average around $156. Still considered. Still above a casual purchase. But it is the gesture we reach least far for, and there is something telling in that. We spend the most when there is a name for the feeling, and a date we will remember it by.
A reasonable read of all this is that flowers are a way of measuring a moment out loud. The further a relationship or a milestone sits from the ordinary, the more we are willing to put behind the gesture that marks it.
The year has a rhythm, and you can feel where it lifts
Spending is not flat across the calendar. It breathes.
For most of the year the average order sits somewhere between $142 and $158, the steady rate of ordinary affection. Then it lifts in three places. December rises to around $163 as the year closes and people gather. February climbs to about $166 for Valentine's. And the highest stretch is autumn, across April and May, where the average reaches roughly $167, carried by Mother's Day and the turn of the season.
We spend the most when there is a name for the feeling, and a date we will remember it by.
The shape is intuitive once you see it. We spend more in the windows when sending flowers is expected of us, which is also when not sending them would be noticed. These are the dates that come with a small social weight: the ones where the gesture is partly for the person and partly a way of being present in a moment everyone is marking at once.
A caveat worth stating plainly. This is a single year, so what we are describing is the rhythm of one calendar, not a trend running across several. We can tell you when the year lifts. We cannot yet tell you whether each peak is rising over time. That is a study for more years than we have looked at here.
A third of us send more than flowers
For all the focus on the bouquet, about a third of orders, 34 percent, include more than one item. A vase. A card. A small gift alongside the flowers. On average an order carries 1.45 items.
This matters for how the spending should be read. The figures here are average order value, the full value of what someone bought, not the price of a bouquet on its own. So part of what lifts the spend on an anniversary or a new baby is not a grander arrangement at all. It is the second thought: the vase so the flowers have somewhere to live, the card so the feeling has words, the thing chosen to sit beside the flowers rather than replace them.
It is a small detail that says a lot. When people care most, they tend not to spend more on the same thing. They add another thing. The gesture grows outward, toward the person, rather than simply upward in price.
What the considered gift is actually for
The considered gift costs a little more, and the data is fairly clear about why. It is not the stems. It is the standard the moment is being held to.
When the occasion has a name and a date, people spend more, because they are not really buying flowers. They are buying the certainty that the moment will land the way they meant it to. That the arrangement will arrive looking like it was chosen rather than grabbed. That the card will say the thing. That the person opening the door will feel thought about, not processed. The difference between careless gifting and considered gifting is not the budget. It is whether the sender was thinking about the moment after, the one they will never see, when the flowers are sitting on the kitchen bench and the person who received them is quietly glad.
That is the part the money is buying, and it is the part that lasts. The bouquet is gone in a fortnight. The feeling of having been remembered, properly, by someone who reached a little further than they had to, stays much longer than the flowers do.
Osaka + Vase
A considered arrangement that arrives with somewhere to live, the flowers and the vase chosen together. From $265. View Osaka + Vase.
So the spend is not really the cost of flowers. It is the cost of caring out loud, on the record, in a way the other person can hold. Read the figures back and they stop being numbers. They become a list of the moments we have decided are worth marking well: the anniversaries, the new arrivals, the losses, the good news, and the ordinary days we send something anyway, for no reason except that someone came to mind.
The next time one of those moments arrives, the question is not how little it can be done for. It is what you want the person to feel when the flowers reach them, and how you would like to be remembered for the gesture once they have.
When you are ready to mark one, explore the full range.
A note on method: these figures come from a full year of Fig & Bloom orders placed in the twelve months to June 2026. They reflect what our customers chose, not a national average, and our customers tend toward the considered end of gifting. Average order value is the full value of each order and can include a vase, a card or a gift alongside the flowers, so it is not a bouquet price. Because we looked at a single year, the monthly pattern describes the rhythm of that year rather than a change over time.
