I think once sort of things level out a little bit, probably sort of to the latter part of this years I think you’re going to see a lot of activity actually in the energy side as people sort of reset and think about their structure. As it relates to the consumer side, I think you sort of hit it accurately.
Relative to — given the fact that we’re not in a lot of the geographic markets that are going to be impacted more by falling oil prices, our consumers will see sort of that increase in a tax refund equivalent of falling oil prices. Have we seen it yet? It might be too early. I’ve looked closely at spending numbers and at credit card numbers and those kind of things. While they’re marginally up, it might be a little bit early to sort of see the total impact of that. But I have to believe that over the course of the year we’ll see the most positive side for us arcing much more toward the consumer side than the risk on the energy side.
Aleem Gillani
I’d also point out that the vast majority of our corporate and commercial clients are in our footprint and they’re going to also benefit from the drop in energy prices. So we’ve got this clear differentiation between energy and consumer but even within the corporate and commercial base, our overall client base ought to do better with lower energy prices.
Operator
Our next question will come from John Pancari of Evercore ISI. Your line is open.
John Pancari, Evercore, ISI
Good morning.
Bill Rogers
Good morning, John.
Aleem Gillani
Hi, John.
John Pancari
On the expense side, on the comp expense, sorry if you’ve already commented on it, but just wanted to get a little more color around the decline in the comp expense, the drivers of it and how sustainable that decline is. Is it all related to the efforts you’ve been doing on the headcount side and the efficiencies and should we, barring any typical seasonality, should we use this as a new base?
Bill Rogers
John, it’s a little bit of both.
It’s a little bit of we continued to get more efficient but in addition we also had a reversal of some incentive accruals and actually for the year our medical costs came in lower than we were expecting. Our experience on that side ended up being a little bit better.
So some of the benefit in the fourth quarter was the result of those and as I said earlier, if I think about total comp expense, I would increase that in Q1 about $100 million reel relative to Q4. Some of that for normal FICA 401-K seasonality and some of that just because we’re starting from the lower number in the fourth quarter.
John Pancari
Okay. Thank you. Sorry had to repeat that.
And then on the commercial loan growth in the quarter, just wanted to get some additional details behind the drivers of the growth and then also your expectation around the C&I portfolio growth in coming quarters.
Bill Rogers
The good news, John, is it’s really, really broad-based. We really saw — if you look at sort of the total year, virtually every vertical that we’re involved in on the C&I space grew. So some at obviously different paces. But it reflects the diversity of our business mix, the investments that we’ve made. It was fairly universal. It wasn’t sort of in any one particular place. We did see a little uptick in utilization. I don’t want to sort of overplay that because quarter to quarter it can go up and down.
But this quarter was up and up a little more than we have seen in previous quarters. I think on balance that’s a good thing. Hopefully that reflects sort of more of that investment capital type of bar. But it was very broad based.
