London, UK — With Halloween landing on Saturday this year, retailers are being warned that theft incidents could rise as much as 2.5 times the level experienced in 2025, according to the latest analysis from SAI, a leading active intelligence solution for stores.
As Halloween continues to grow as a key trading day, consumer spending around the event is expected to reach £705million this year – a +6% rise compared to 2025. Adoption by shoppers is also on the increase, with 46% of UK shoppers planning to celebrate the occasion, increasing to 78% among families.
While Halloween is now one of the biggest sales events of the UK retail calendar, heightened footfall in-store alongside ongoing economic pressures on household finances mean the event has become a growing target for theft.
Data from its SAI One Platform, which analyses insight from more than 1,000 UK retail locations and inputs from over 30,000 cameras every day, showed that in 2025 Halloween (Fri, 31 Oct) shoplifting rose by +67% on the daily average.
This year, with Halloween falling on a Saturday – consistently one of the highest risk days of the week for retail crime – shoplifting is forecast to rise 150% year-on-year.
Partial payment, where a customer only pays for part of their basket while intentionally leaving other items unpaid, is expected to make up the majority of shoplifting attempts on Halloween (58%). This is followed by grab-and-go theft (33%) and item switching, where a shopper deliberately selects a lower-priced product at self-checkout in place of a higher-value item (8%).
“Often regarded as the gateway to the Golden Quarter, Halloween provides retailers with an early opportunity to kick off their Peak Trading campaigns. But with that potential reward comes risk – and the darker side of Halloween is becoming a growing challenge for retailers wanting to capitalise on seasonal spending,” said Clare Hoole, Head of UK at SAI.
“Surges in footfall, combined with colleagues focused on servicing busier stores, can create more opportunities for theft, while more sophisticated offending behaviours, such as partial payment, become harder to detect,” Hoole added. “Real-time visibility and intelligence that enable retailers to intervene before losses occur will be critical to protecting margins and delivering a successful Spooky Season trading period.”
Looking ahead to the rest of the Golden Quarter, SAI’s analysis forecasts that Super Saturday (19 Dec), the last Saturday before Christmas and often one of the busiest in-store trading days of the festive season, will be the biggest day for retail crime, with shoplifting expected to surge +66% year-on-year.