Job worries rose and price worries eased in 2025, the Fed's household survey found

On May 13, 2026, the Federal Reserve Board in Washington issued its report on the economic well-being of U.S. households in 2025. It rests on the Board's annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), answered by nearly 13,000 adults in the United States between October 17 and October 28, 2025. The overall picture was one of stability: the Fed described financial well-being as consistent with recent years and still a little below its level just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Underneath, worries about jobs grew and several groups lost ground.

What the survey is

The Board has run the SHED every fourth quarter since 2013, and the 2025 survey was its 13th. The research firm Ipsos fielded it online through KnowledgePanel, a panel recruited by address-based sampling. Of 17,899 panel members contacted, 13,099 completed the survey; after a small number of incomplete or rushed responses were dropped, the report used 12,934. The results are weighted to represent the estimated 265 million U.S. adults age 18 and older.

The SHED measures how people say they are managing, either at the time of the survey or over the previous 12 months, rather than over the exact calendar year. The Fed's own guidance says the survey is not designed to give representative estimates for individual states, so it is a national picture.

The main figures

Jobs: solid, but softer than a year earlier

The Fed read the job results as a labor market that remained solid but had softened since the previous survey. Besides the rise in job worries and layoffs, slightly fewer people left a job voluntarily (8% of adults) and fewer changed jobs than in 2024. Among adults under 30, 15% were not working and said that being unable to find work was part of the reason, and the Fed said more young adults gave that answer than a year earlier.

Job worries rose at every income level and age, but they weighed most at the bottom. Adults with income under $50,000 were nearly three times as likely as those with $50,000 or more to call finding or keeping a job a major concern, at 30% against 11%. The survey also found that one in four workers had used generative artificial intelligence at work in the month before the survey.

Prices and household budgets

Price increases remained the most common money worry, named as a minor or major concern by 91% of adults, the same share as in 2024. Fewer called it a major concern, but the Fed noted that this measure was generally flat among lower-income and younger adults. Asked about the past year, 58% said changes in the prices they paid had left them worse off, down from 60% in 2024 and 65% in 2023.

Sixteen percent of adults had not paid all their bills in the month before the survey. Over the year, 59% faced at least one major unexpected expense, most often a big vehicle repair or replacement (30% of adults), followed by a major house or appliance repair (22%) and unexpected major medical bills (21%).

Who lost ground

The Fed stressed that the steady national figure hid declines for some groups. Among adults with family income under $25,000, 45% said they were doing okay or living comfortably, 4 points fewer than in 2024. Among Black adults the share fell 5 points, to 60%. For adults ages 18 to 29 it was 63%, compared with 83% for those age 60 or over, a gap the Fed said widened mainly because of a decline among 18- to 24-year-olds.

Living arrangements point the same way. In 2025, 49% of adults under 30 lived with a parent, up 6 points since 2022 and 12 points since 2019. Renters reported more strain too, with the share who had fallen behind on rent at some point in the year up 6 points since 2021.

Savings, credit and fraud

Savings buffers were thin for many households. Seventy percent of adults said they could handle an emergency expense of at least $500 using only their savings, but among adults with income under $50,000, four in ten could not cover even a $100 expense that way. Twenty percent of adults reported financial fraud or scams, similar to a year earlier, and the Fed estimated that non-credit-card fraud totaled about $100 billion in 2025, of which consumers bore $56 billion directly. Among adults with student loans, 23% had recent trouble making payments, and use of buy now, pay later plans edged up to 16% of adults.

The SHED provides valuable data on how households are dealing with evolving financial opportunities and challenges.

Where things stand now

When we checked on November 12, 2026, the Fed's SHED page still listed the report on 2025 under "Current Survey," with links to the survey data and to appendixes that include the questionnaire. Its figures describe the time of the survey, in October 2025, or the 12 months before it. For official data since then, see our reports on October consumer prices and October payrolls. The Census Bureau's separate income report measures household money income rather than how people say they are coping; our explainer on its 2025 figures sets out what it found.