The US economic expansion was less robust than initially reported in Q1.

That was the message from the BEA’s second estimate of first-quarter growth, released on Thursday in the long shadow of key data on prices, income and spending for April.

Headline growth ran just 1.6% during the first three months of 2026, the revised GDP figures showed. That was 0.4ppt slower than the advance read, released late last month.

As the figure reminds you, the original consensus for that print was 2.2% — we’re trailing that by 0.6ppt now.

Although the critical “real final sales to private domestic purchasers” line was revised only slightly to reflect a still-healthy 2.4% annualized gain, the pace of personal consumption was marked down to 1.4%.

That latter print was the slowest since Q1 of 2025, when the US economy technically contracted on trade distortions. The quarterly core PCE price readout, meanwhile, was revised up to 4.4%, the quickest in three years.

So, the slowest pace of spending in four quarters and the quickest pace of underlying inflation in 12. That’s not ideal.

Another notable: GDI posted a mere 0.9% gain, the slowest since Q4 of 2022. When you roll up the downwardly-revised headline GDP print with that GDI readout, you get an average of 1.3%. That was better than Q4, when the GDP headline was suffocated by government shutdown dynamics, but it’s hardly gangbusters.

On the bright side, the big increase in nonresidential fixed investment (which here just means AI capex) largely stood — it shows a 10.1% advance compared to an initially-reported 10.4% gain.

All in all, the second estimate of Q1 GDP for the US painted a mixed picture. This won’t get a lot of attention on Thursday, but the nuance was worth parsing.