Consumer financial lives survey microdata: FCA waves, tables and the GeoDS file

The word "microdata" needs unpacking before you plan anything. What the UK FCA Financial Lives Survey publishes directly is aggregate crosstabulation: 18 XLSX data-table volumes plus 17 tracker volumes per recent wave, cut by sex, age band, ethnicity groups and further demographics, with unweighted bases, weighted counts and significance-test flags printed beside every figure. True respondent-level records for 2024 live outside fca.org.uk entirely, distributed through the Geographic Data Service (GeoDS).

Sample sizes are stable enough to trend against: 12,865 adults in April 2017, 16,190 in February 2020, 19,145 in May 2022 and 17,950 in the latest wave, fielded 5 February to 16 June 2024. That 12,865-19,145 span is what makes subgroup work viable - an age-band or ethnicity cut still rests on thousands of interviews.

The 2024 edition ships 18 volumes covering demographics, attitudes, product ownership, assets & debt, retail banking, cash savings, payments, consumer investments, mortgages, credit and loans, general insurance and protection, pension accumulation, pension decumulation, advice and support, cross-sector, topics, summaries, and consumer experiences. Beside them sit 17 matching tracker volumes, Annex A on product holdings, caveats tables and underlying chart data for every report. Volumes run roughly 0.5-2 MB each, and about 56 spreadsheet links hang on the 2024 publication page.

The practical stance: treat the crosstabs as the dependable layer you can cite today and treat GeoDS as a request route for the respondent-level file. Anything deadline-bound should be built from the XLSX volumes, whose availability is verified and whose structure the data user guide documents wave by wave.

Financial Lives is the UK entry in a small set of demand-side household-finance surveys Datadory catalogs, and the differences are structural rather than cosmetic.

If you need respondent-level rows with no request step, the American surveys win: SHED public use data files ship annually as public-domain CSV, and the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances publishes multiply-imputed family records with replicate weights for correct standard errors. If you need breadth, the World Bank Global Findex Database 2025 spans 141 economies. If you need the UK specifically - product holdings, resilience, credit use, vulnerability - Financial Lives is the only regulator-published source at this depth.

For the dataset itself, the UK FCA Financial Lives Survey record lists formats, access steps and quality scoring; the consumer finance data hub indexes the wider vertical; and the specialized-consumer-services data hub collects every pooled record in this industry.