Amid bad weather and economic headwinds, consumer spending in the Philippines further slowed in the third quarter of 2025, according to global financial giant Visa.

“Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam struggled with weak tourism, subdued domestic demand, and manufacturing slowdowns, leading to quarterly contractions in their respective SMIs,” read Visa Business and Economic Insights’ Asia-Pacific Spending Momentum Index (SMI) report for October 2025, published last week.

According to Visa principal Asia-Pacific economist Simon Baptist and Asia-Pacific economist Minakshi Barman, the Philippines’ SMI declined by 3.7 points during the July-to-September period.

This drop “[reflected] the combined effects of seasonal slack from the rainy and typhoon season, the culturally observed ‘ghost month’ phenomenon—a time of caution and observance for many households—plus subdued domestic demand, global trade headwinds, and ongoing concerns over household income and inflation,” the report explained.

The fall in Philippine consumer spending momentum outpaced the 1.1-point contraction across emerging Asia, which also includes India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

It also reversed the 3.2-point increase in the country’s second-quarter SMI, which had bucked the subdued consumer spending momentum in emerging Asia during the April-to-June period.

Visa’s regional and national SMIs, which compare each quarter with the same period in the previous year, measure year-on-year changes in consumer spending using Visa bankcards.

Emerging Asia’s SMI stood at 97.4—below the 100 threshold, indicating contraction—in the third quarter of 2025, higher than advanced Asia’s 94.9 but lower than Australia and New Zealand’s 103.4. Advanced Asia covers Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore.

As of end-September 2025, the Philippines’ discretionary spending momentum declined to 93.5 from 97.2 at end-June. Non-discretionary spending momentum also fell to 87.3 at end-September from 90.3 a quarter ago.

The country’s monthly SMIs from July to September 2025 were all “contracting,” continuing the quarterly trend that began in the first quarter of 2024, Visa’s Asia SMI heatmap showed.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, the Philippines’ SMI was “weakening” following a “steady state” in the third quarter of 2023 and a “strengthening” SMI in the second quarter of 2023.

In the first quarter of 2023 as well as the fourth quarter of 2022, the Philippines posted “expanding” SMIs.

Back in July, Baptist said in a LinkedIn post that the quarterly Asia-Pacific SMI for the second quarter of 2025 marked the first time Visa’s real-time measure of spending momentum covered the 11 regional markets.

“The Visa SMI measures the breadth of year-over-year change in household spending within an economy, including the share of households with increased spending compared with those where spending was stable or declined. The index is generated using proprietary techniques that extract economic signals from business-related noise inherent in VisaNet transaction data, such as portfolio flips, routing changes, or evolving acceptance across geographies or merchant segments. Regional and national aggregates are population-weighted averages,” Visa explained in the report.

“The resulting sample data is then aggregated using a diffusion index framework in which index values are scored from zero to 200. Values above 100 indicate broad-based net acceleration in economic momentum. Values below 100 indicate contraction on an annual basis,” according to Visa.