Seventy-four percent of people plan to celebrate Halloween this year, according to the National Retail Federation’s 2026 consumer survey — up from 69% a decade ago. But the way they’re celebrating has quietly shifted. Door-to-door trick-or-treating and pumpkin carving rebounded after the pandemic but never climbed back to pre-pandemic levels, and both have actually declined over the past couple of years. What’s picking up the slack: families with young kids are now more likely than adults overall to plan on attending a themed event — pumpkin patches, community parties, and trunk-or-treats specifically.
If your group chat has been full of “is anyone doing a trunk-or-treat this year” messages, you’re not imagining a trend. Here’s why it’s actually growing, what it costs to pull one together, and how to either host one or show up prepared before Saturday.
Why Parents Are Choosing a Trunk Over a Sidewalk
The appeal isn’t really about candy — it’s about who’s handing it out. Wes Wright, a Detroit-area parent and founder of CookOut News, only takes his kids to their school’s trunk-or-treat, organized by the PTO, because parents buy and pool the candy ahead of time. “For our peace of mind, we know the candy is extra safe because we bought it,” he told Fox News. That one sentence is the whole trend: a trunk-or-treat replaces strangers at a hundred different doors with a parking lot full of people whose kids go to the same school, or whose families sit in the same church pews.
Baruch Labunski, CEO of Rank Secure, points out the format also began that way on purpose — churches and civic groups started organizing them roughly 20 years ago specifically to create a smaller, more contained space than a sprawling neighborhood walk. Schools in Wisconsin’s Superior School District, Holy Family Church in Old Town, Maine, and Cape Coral City Hall in Florida are all hosting versions of the same idea this year, and the Austin Police Department is running its third annual event. None of these are new inventions — they’re the same low-key format spreading to more towns every year.
There’s a side benefit nobody plans for but everyone notices: a trunk-or-treat takes 45 minutes instead of two hours of walking, which matters a lot more when Halloween lands on a Saturday and everyone’s also trying to fit in a daytime costume party or a high school football game.
What It Actually Costs to Decorate a Trunk
This is the part that surprises first-timers: you don’t need a Pinterest-board budget to not embarrass your kid in the parking lot. The Halloween & Costume Association says manufacturers now sell dedicated trunk decoration kits for around $9.99 — pre-cut spiderwebs, battery lights, themed backdrops — specifically because the trend got big enough to justify a product category. That’s the entire decorating budget for a lot of families: one kit, a few dollar-store pumpkins, and whatever Halloween decor is already sitting in the garage from the front porch.
Trunk decoration ideas are trending hard on Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram right now, which is both helpful and a trap — it’s easy to scroll for twenty minutes and end up planning a theme more elaborate than the one afternoon you actually have to set it up. Labunski also notes car enthusiasts have embraced the events, sometimes pairing them with cruise-ins or small car shows, which is a fun bonus if your neighborhood has that crowd but not a requirement for anyone else.
The actual cost breakdown, if you’re hosting or decorating one trunk:
- One trunk decoration kit (lights, webbing, backdrop): roughly $10.
- Candy for the event: the same bag math as handing out at your front door — buy based on expected kid count, not guesswork, since a trunk-or-treat usually has a known headcount from a sign-up sheet.
- Costume for the decorator: optional, but most photos from these events have at least one adult in a theme costume.
- Folding chair and a thermos: not decoration, but the actual most-requested item by anyone who’s stood in a cold parking lot for two hours.
How to Actually Plan One Before Saturday
If you’re the one organizing — not just showing up — the planning gap is usually logistics, not decorating ideas. The questions that actually trip people up five days out: how many cars are committed, who’s buying candy and in what quantity, what time slot avoids overlapping with a bigger neighborhood event, and who has the extension cord for the lights. None of that is complicated, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that falls apart when it’s tracked across three different group texts instead of one place.
If you’re attending rather than hosting, the planning is shorter but still worth doing the night before: confirm the start time (these tend to run earlier than door-to-door, often 4–6pm to beat the dark), pack a flashlight for the walk between trunks even in a lit lot, and bring a reusable bag — the candy volume from a trunk-or-treat adds up fast since every stop is a guaranteed handout, unlike a house that might not answer.
The Checklist That Keeps a Trunk-or-Treat From Becoming Chaos
Whether you’re the parent coordinating six trunks for a school event or just decorating your own and want to stay on budget, the thing that actually prevents the day-of scramble is writing the plan down before you’re standing in a parking lot at 3:45pm wondering who still needs to bring candy. This Halloween planner has a dedicated outdoor decor and lighting layout page plus a trick-or-treat route and safety map — both built for exactly this kind of event, not just a sit-down dinner party — along with the budget tracker and candy inventory log that keep the $9.99 kit from quietly turning into a $40 Target run.
Trunk-or-treats aren’t replacing door-to-door everywhere, and they don’t need to. But the data backs up what your group chat is already telling you: more families are choosing the parking lot over the sidewalk every year, and the ones who show up with an actual plan — not just a decorated trunk — are the ones who aren’t still setting up lights when the first car pulls in.