Coupa’s Latest Q3 Business Spend Index Report Finds Spend Held Firm In Most Sectors Through Six Months of Market and Tariff Shocks

Built on Coupa's $10.5 trillion dataset of actual B2B transactions, drawing on the same intelligence layer behind Coupa’s leading agentic spend management platform, the quarterly index shows four of five tracked sectors holding or climbing through a 13.2% Nasdaq correction through March, with Healthcare & Life Sciences the only sector to contract.

FOSTER CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Coupa, the leading platform for agentic spend management, released its Q3 2026 Coupa Business Spend Index™ (BSI) Report, which builds on the original Index published in June 2026 and tracks five U.S. sectors: High Technology, Manufacturing, Business Services, Healthcare & Life Sciences, and Financial Services. It reads the economy from inside procurement, built from purchase orders approved, contracts signed and renewals executed across a Coupa community network of more than 11.5 million buyers and suppliers, captured at the moment each commitment is made. That spend commitment is the earliest point business intent can be measured – and increasingly the same real-time signal Coupa’s AI agents already act on inside customers’ spend programs.

“Procurement and finance leaders are asked to read the economy from indicators that arrive late and then get revised,” said Kevin Iaquinto, Chief Marketing Officer at Coupa. “The Coupa Business Spend Index gives them a read built from trillions of dollars in commitments across Coupa’s massive buyer and supplier network, so they can be strategic about where the money goes rather than reacting after the fact. This is exactly the kind of real-time intelligence we’re putting to work in Coupa’s AI agents – so finance and procurement leaders aren’t just reading the economy, they’re acting on it as it happens, building resilient businesses with healthy margins.”

A Few Key BSI Findings

BSI figures are index readings, not dollars: January 2022 equals 100, so the Manufacturing reading of 156.5 below means commitments sit 56.5% above that baseline.

High Tech Bought Straight Through the Market's AI Repricing:

The tech sector treats AI investment as a committed strategic repositioning. While the Nasdaq fell 13.2% from its October 2025 close to a March 2026 trough, the High Technology BSI hit new highs in five of those six months, ending June 2026 up 6.5%.

• IT services surged from 8.8% to 14.1% of High Tech spend—the largest share gain tracked from the second half of 2023 to the first half of 2026. Capital is shifting away from off-the-shelf software licenses and toward the specialized people, platforms, and services required to actually put AI models to work.
• Software fell from 12.5% to 8.6%, even as actual software dollars rose.

Manufacturing: The Commitments Were Already Made: Manufacturing's purchasing surge came in late 2025, months before tariff changes took effect. Because a signed order is often more expensive to exit than complete, tariffs only raise invoice prices rather than shrink the underlying order. Every month of 2026 ran higher than any month in the previous eighteen. Even February, the year's weakest month at 156.5, remained above the previous historical high of 152.5, entirely absorbing the 10% import surcharge that took effect February 24.

Financial Services Registers the First Sustained Softening of Its Cycle: Banks cannot cut compliance and security spending the way they can defer a project. That baseline held, and what eased sat above it. Banking spend reached 121.9 in April 2026, its highest reading since the index began in 2022, then fell for three straight months to 115.4 in July, a 5.3% drop, with the BSI forecasting a further ease toward 112.5 by October. July is still above every reading the sector posted before 2025.

Healthcare and Life Sciences Spent Less While the Economy Grew: While locked-in committed capital cannot adjust quickly, federal funding cuts target discretionary, contract-by-contract allocations that can be cancelled instantly. This half, two major federal policy shifts coincided with spending drops:

• ACA subsidies lapsed on January 1.
• NIH grants to outside researchers fell 34% year-over-year.

Healthcare spending fell 2.8% from February to June (remaining flat May-to-June), diverging sharply from a growing wider economy. Looking ahead, a newly proposed CY 2027 Medicare rule would cut physician payment rates further, a risk providers are likely already factoring into next year's planning.

Business Services Held a Plateau Two Years in the Making: This sector's contracts are attached to programs other industries are already midway through, so cancelling means unwinding a client's transformation. Readings held between 129.3 and 131.7 from January through April, then topped the entire 2025 range in May and June, extending a plateau in place since January 2024. Part of the level is price: services costs rose 2.9% to 3.2% year over year through June.

“These are exactly the kinds of inflection points where autonomous, agent-driven spend controls compound the advantage, catching share shifts and tariff exposure in real time rather than in next quarter’s close,” said Iaquinto.

Download Coupa’s Q3 2026 Business Spend Index Report here.

About Coupa

Coupa is the leading platform for agentic spend management. Over the past 20 years, $10.5 trillion in spend has flowed through Coupa, creating a trusted, community-generated dataset that brings evidence-based intelligence and AI agents to a network of 11.5M+ buyers and suppliers. The world's leading brands use Coupa to turn fragmented processes into a source of continuous savings, resilience, and better decisions to realize $340 billion in lifetime customer savings and counting. With Coupa, spend becomes strategy. Learn more at coupa.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).