Back-to-school shopping is big business — but there are still plenty of deals to be found. For families looking to save money, CashNetUSA uncovered Arizona’s most affordable stores for school supplies.

America’s annual back-to-school spend is around $40 billion, including around $6.3 billion on stationery such as notebooks, folders, scissors and pens. Ahead of the 2024-25 school year, parents expected to spend $586 per child for school supplies on average, including clothing ($169), shoes ($113), electronic devices ($206) and stationery ($94), according to the United States Senate Federal Credit Union.

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But around half (48%) of families leave back-to-school shopping until the last two weeks before school, missing out on off-season bargains and giving retailers the edge in optimizing their price strategy. Plus, a last-minute shop reduces the freedom to shop around — and there are bargains to be found if you know where to shop.

To help you save, CashNetUSA’s deal-hunting experts manually collected the prices of 52 essential school supplies across 26 top chain stores. Their findings uncovered the most affordable stores in every state, helping families on a budget find the best back-to-school deals this year.

Key Findings

● Walmart is the most affordable store to buy back-to-school goods on a national level — a basket of supplies at Walmart is 60.1% cheaper than the average across other top stores.

● Aside from Walmart, Dollar General has the most items that are cheapest in class, with a particular emphasis on writing and drawing supplies.

● Shoppers can bring the price of supplies down by picking up individual items from different stores — for example, graph paper and erasers cost the least at Meijer stores.

The Methodology Behind This Study

CashNetUSA manually sourced the prices of essential elementary, middle and high school supplies from the most popular national and regional stores across America. First, they curated a seed list of 52 essential school supplies divided by grade (elementary, middle and high school).

Next, the team found the prices of these items from 26 national and regional chains, favoring the cheapest option available. To discover the most affordable stores overall, CashNetUSA calculated the total cost of supplies across all three grades for each store.

Data is correct as of March 2025.