The Federal Reserve’s latest family finance survey uncovered a striking contradiction: Americans feel more financially stable than they did during the pandemic, yet their confidence about what next year will bring just hit an all-time low.
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A record 37% of families told the Federal Reserve they did not have a good idea of what their income would be for the next year. The finding comes from the Fed’s report Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2022 to 2025, which is built on the 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The report calls the reading a new SCF high. Families answered the question during the 2025 survey, so the figure shows how they saw their chances at that point. The survey’s dollar income figures cover the prior calendar year, 2024.
What the 37% Figure Actually Captures
The SCF is a triennial survey that the Fed has sponsored every three years since 1989. It counts families. A family’s characteristics are generally those of its designated reference person, and the sample is built to cover the full wealth distribution, including the very rich. The question asks whether families have a good idea of their income for the next year, which the Fed uses “as a way to measure families’ uncertainty over their future income”. It measures forward-looking confidence. It says nothing about whether a family’s income is high or low.
The survey also tracks a separate, backward-looking measure: whether a family’s income in the reference year was unusually high or low compared with what it would expect in a “normal year”. That share was 28% in the 2022 survey, a jump the Fed linked to the pandemic economy and related policies. In the 2025 survey it fell to 23%, back to the pre-pandemic share.
The two measures moved in opposite directions. Fewer families described their recent income as unusual, yet more of them could not say what their income would be in the year ahead. Their income had settled down, but their confidence about future income had not.
Uncertainty Has Climbed in Every Survey Since 2019
The Fed states that the share of families without a good idea of their next-year income has continued to increase since the 2019 survey, ending at its high in 2025. For the 2019 and 2022 results, the report refers readers to a 2025 paper by Fed economists Aditya Aladangady, Andrew C. Chang and Jacob Krimmel. Across the three surveys the share rose each time, and that consistent rise matters more than the size of any single step.
The economic background explains part of it. Between the 2022 and 2025 surveys, the civilian unemployment rate rose from 3.7% to 4.2%, and consumer prices rose at an average annual rate of 3.6%. Strain also showed up in the debt data. The share of families behind on loan payments rose from about 12% to almost 20%. Mood readings since then remain weak. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment index stood at 51.7 in August 2026, below the 60 level the index’s guide associates with recession conditions.
Why Unpredictable Income Hits Pre-Retirees Hardest
Families approaching retirement have the least room to absorb a bad guess. The SCF counts pensions, Social Security and withdrawals from retirement accounts as income. For older households, a fuzzy income forecast therefore often reflects uncertainty about how much they can safely draw down.
The amounts involved are large. About 70% of families aged 45 to 64 participated in a retirement plan in 2025. Among families aged 55 to 64 with an IRA or defined contribution plan, mean retirement savings reached $670.2 thousand, up from $588.5 thousand in 2022. When income is hard to forecast, a family planning withdrawals from a balance that size faces three practical problems:
- Budgeting: Fixed costs such as housing, insurance and healthcare premiums need to be set against a conservative income estimate, since the expected figure may not arrive.
- Emergency savings: A cash reserve covers the gap when a paycheck, bonus or part-time income falls short. Without one, the family may have to sell retirement assets at a bad time.
- Withdrawal planning: Uneven income makes it harder to plan the size and timing of distributions, which in turn affects taxes and how long the savings last.
The national saving data show shrinking buffers. The personal saving rate was 4.4% in the second quarter of 2026, compared with 6.9% in the first quarter of 2024, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Record Income Uncertainty Is a Planning Problem
The 2025 SCF found that families’ recent income had returned to normal while their confidence about future income fell to a record low. For anyone close to retirement, the practical response is to budget on the low end of expected income and build the cash reserve before it is needed (we laid out a method for turning a lump sum into something that acts like a paycheck, including the mix and the withdrawal order, in a free guide here). The next SCF will show whether the rise that began after 2019 continues.
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