UK FCA Financial Lives Survey

UK FCA Financial Lives Survey data is the Financial Conduct Authority's measurement of how British adults actually bank, save, borrow, insure and retire - and where they fall through the gaps. The UK's conduct regulator has fielded it four times: April 2017 (12,865 respondents), February 2020 (16,190), May 2022 (19,145) and February-June 2024 (17,950), with cost-of-living recontact surveys layered in between in January 2023 and January 2024.

Each wave ships a key findings report, an eighteen-part topic deck series running from cash savings and consumer investments through mortgages, credit and loans, pensions, payments, fraud and vulnerability, a full questionnaire with crib sheets, a technical report, a data user guide, and the multi-volume data tables behind every published chart. It is the evidence base the regulator itself uses to size consumer harm and track whether outcomes are improving - which makes it the citation of record for anyone arguing about UK household finance.

Get a sample of this dataset scoped to your topics and demographic cuts.

Three rows from the 2024 product-holding annex show the grammar every volume shares - item, base, percentage, significance letters:

TABLE : Product holding annex, Table 1         WAVE : 2024

ITEM : Any day-to-day account
       unweighted base 17609    weighted 17521
       total 98%     men 98%     ages 18-24 95%

ITEM : Any current account
       unweighted base 17528    total 97%
       sigtest -> differs from columns C1 D1 E1 G1 H1 I1

ITEM : Savings account (bank, building society)
       unweighted base 11207

Read it once and the whole catalogue falls open: every finding arrives as a percentage sitting on an explicit base, broken down by sex, age band and ethnicity group, with letters pointing at whichever columns it statistically differs from. The third row is the story the headlines hide - 97 to 98 percent of adults hold a payment account, while the savings-account row sits on an unweighted base of 11,207 against 17,528 for any current account. That spread, quantified across every demographic cut, is what these tables exist to deliver.

The 2024 release alone comprises eighteen data-table volumes - demographics, attitudes, product ownership, assets and 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 - plus seventeen matching tracker volumes repeating the same questions across earlier waves, an annex dedicated to product holdings, caveats tables, and the underlying chart data behind each report.

The spine documented below repeats in every volume; each topic volume then layers on its own items and extra demographic breakdowns. Everything beyond the spine ships as additional fields on request: name the volume, the topic and the demographic cut, and the extract returns the matching blocks with bases intact.

• Geography: United Kingdom, nationally representative of adults, with nation and region breakdowns carried in some volumes.
• Temporal: four main waves - April 2017, February 2020, May 2022 and February-June 2024 - plus cost-of-living recontacts in January 2023 and January 2024; tracker volumes align questions across waves, so the 2017-2024 trend runs without guesswork.
• Granularity: aggregate crosstabulations by sex, age band, ethnicity group and further per-volume breakdowns, each cell carrying unweighted and weighted bases; respondent-level records for the 2024 wave circulate separately from the published tables.

Set against the wider catalog - where the average quality score across all 1,744 datasets is 7.81 - this slice scores 8/10, carried by national representativeness, regulator-grade documentation and a seven-year comparable series.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

You choose the channel and the cadence; the table grammar above travels unchanged across all three. Full-history loads suit teams rebuilding the 2017-2024 trend once and joining it to their own portfolio or panel data. Wave-scoped extracts suit product surfaces and dashboards that render a handful of percentages with their bases attached. Warehouse delivery suits analysts running demographic cuts in SQL next to their own customer tables. Changing cadence is a settings conversation, not a re-integration project.

1. Vulnerability and fair-treatment research - this is the instrument the regulator built to size harm, so resilience indicators, vulnerability characteristics and experiences-of-firm results let compliance teams benchmark their own book against the national picture instead of a trade poll.
2. Market sizing and gap analysis - the 2024 product-holding rows put any current account at 97 percent of adults while the savings-account row rests on an unweighted base of 11,207 against 17,528; the distance between those numbers is the addressable market for savings, investment and protection products, pre-segmented by age band and ethnicity group.
3. Product strategy for banks, insurers and pension providers - subgroup adoption sits one column away from every headline, so a payments, decumulation or protection decision can be argued from the same tables the regulator publishes.
4. Conduct and communications benchmarking - quote the regulator's own figures rather than secondhand summaries, with the base that produced each percentage still attached.
5. Policy research and journalism - tracker volumes align questions across the 2017-2024 waves, so a trend claim footnotes to an aligned series instead of two differently-worded press releases.
6. Thought leadership and content - percentages backed by explicit bases survive scrutiny; cite the 95 percent account-holding figure for 18-24s knowing the cell behind it is public.

Get a sample of this dataset scoped to the volumes and cuts you argue with most.

Competitive intel and product teams at banks, building societies, insurers and pension providers get the demand-side map of their market, including the people who hold nothing with anyone - the targeting brief written by the population itself. Market researchers and consultants get the standard citation for UK financial-services sizing: weighted, wave-consistent, and regulator-published, so 'around a third of adults lack a savings account' footnotes to a row rather than a vibe. Data scientists and ML engineers get tidy crosstabs and aligned tracker series ready to join onto internal segments, and the 2024 respondent-level records carry weights with documented application instructions. Journalists, academics and policy analysts get the primary record behind every UK financial-vulnerability headline, deep enough to disaggregate what headlines average away.

Notes and adjacent reading:

• World Bank Global Findex Database 2025 - the same demand-side questions asked of economies worldwide; pair them to place UK account ownership and digital-payment behavior in global context.
• Fed SHED Survey Data - the Federal Reserve's annual well-being survey, the closest structural cousin to Financial Lives for the US; useful for transatlantic comparisons of resilience measures.
• Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) - balance-sheet depth behind the US picture, complementing Financial Lives' behavioral breadth.
• FCA Financial Services Register data - the supply-side register of authorized firms from the same regulator; join firm populations against this survey's consumer-side demand.

The card rail below collects these alongside the rest of the vertical: browse the whole shelf on the Consumer Finance data hub or the ranked shortlist of the best consumer finance datasets.