Adult Financial Wellbeing Survey 2021

The questionnaire covers the building blocks required for people to feel financially resilient, confident, and empowered. These include:

• Current and longer-term financial wellbeing
• Day-to-day behaviours like managing credit, active saving and keeping track of spending
• Planning behaviours like pension saving and building resilience against expected and unexpected life events
• Enablers and inhibitors like confidence, sense of control, financial numeracy and engagement with money information, advice, and guidance.

The survey has previously been conducted in 2015 and 2018. For the 2021 survey, we have added some questions to help us assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, on financial wellbeing.

There are separate survey results for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Approximately 1000 interviews were carried out within each devolved nation, and for 2021 there has been an increase in the number of interviews in each of the government regions in England.

The survey helps The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) identify those who are most at need of support in managing their money, and areas where financial wellbeing is lowest. We also use it to:

• Create a summary measure of individuals overall financial wellbeing
• Understand the profile of MaPS’ ‘squeezed’, ‘struggling’ and ‘cushioned’ segments
• Summarise the building blocks of financial capability
• Help measure three of the five goals for the UK Strategy for Financial Wellbeing

This report provides an overview of results based on nine key questions of financial wellbeing.

This report compares the headline findings for different demographic groups, and explores some of the changes since 2018, prior to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

We have published several reports using the data from the survey and these are linked below. These are added to our research page when they are released.

So far, we have shared the following reports from the survey:

• Nation of Savers
• Credit Counts 
• Future Focus 
• Mental Health
• Gender
• Ethnicity

Read the 2021 survey technical report to learn more about how we collected and processed the data.

We have also shared the following press releases:

As part of Talk Money Week in November 2021:

• Up to 4 million parents keep mum on money matters
• 24 million UK adults don’t feel confident managing their money. Talk Money Week is here to help.

January 2022 press release:

• Beat the blues by focusing on financial wellbeing

MaPS wants as many people as possible to use and share the findings. The data is freely available via the CDRCOpens in a new window website, following an application, and may be used with acknowledgment.