Insights from our latest survey of financial wellbeing, using the FinWell Index we developed last year, shows that overall the nation has seen a drop in financial wellbeing from 100 to 99.
The FinWell Index has been designed to measure and track the state of the nation’s financial wellbeing, enabling us to see whether the financial wellbeing of people across the UK has improved or decreased year-on-year. And to unpick why this might be the case.
The study gathers information about individuals' financial capabilities (how they are able to manage and spend their money), and subjective financial wellbeing (how it makes them feel).
The 2025 FinWell Index highlights an overall decline especially in some of the capability measures. For example, there has been a 2.5% decline in debt management capability, and a 2.4% drop in people’s ability to pay for all necessary expenses. These are large, year-on-year changes.
While these overall scores have shown decreases, underlying this are some wider shifts among specific groups.
The widening gender gap
One of the most concerning findings from 2025 is the expansion of the already-significant gender gap in financial wellbeing.
Last year we reported that men have significantly higher levels of financial wellbeing than women, with a 5.2 percentage point gap. The gap has widened to 6.7 points in 2025 - a 29% increase in inequality.
While women report a decrease across all categories, the one that sees the sharpest decline is Financial Resilience (such as the ability to manage debt or deal with unexpected expenses).
Older People have the Highest Financial Wellbeing
We continue to see a strong relationship between age and financial wellbeing. Across both years we found that the older you are, the higher your FinWell Index score.
In 2025, our youngest group of 18-24 year olds report the lowest score of any age group (88), while our oldest group of those who are 75 or older continue to have the highest scores (118). The 30 percentage point age gap shows that there are structural factors that affect different groups of people in different ways.
Vulnerable groups show the largest decline
It is perhaps no surprise that the unemployed experience some of the lowest levels of financial wellbeing. But they also experienced one of the largest declines, dropping 6 points from 81, in 2024 to 75 this year. Students are also struggling, declining by 2 points from an already-low baseline of 87 to 85. Their resilience measure fell by 6 points, suggesting they're finding it harder to cope with financial shocks or manage their limited resources. Lastly, single parents continued to fare poorly, declining by almost 2 points from 86 to 84.
Taking Action
The FinWell Index paints an even more challenging picture for the UK population’s financial situation than it did last year. Our past work in this space has shown that vulnerable populations are more likely to be affected, but that behaviourally informed policies and tools can help address some of the challenges people face.
For example, our work with Citizen’s Advice to understand how we can reduce harms people face from Buy Now Pay Later, which can further increase issues with debt management. Here too, the tendency was for this problem to disproportionately affect vulnerable populations such as single parents.
It raises the question, how can we continue to put in place behaviourally informed policies and tools, to increase access to necessary services and ensure vulnerable populations aren’t worse off?
More about the FinWell Index
Last year, we were approached by Stream with this challenge, “Can we find a way of tracking Financial Wellbeing in the same way that Halifax tracks house prices? “
We set about doing a review of the latest academic literature including existing measure, scales and questions and came to two main conclusions: To truly understand financial wellbeing, we need to consider what a person’s financial skills and circumstances allow them to do, i.e. financial capability. How a person’s finances makes them feel or financial subjective wellbeing, is as important as other measures such as spending capacity or income, but existing scales do not measure this.
We concluded that the best way to address Stream’s challenge was to build an index that takes into account these insights, and so we developed the Financial Wellbeing (FinWell) Index. The FinWell Index is built from 15 questions, organised around 5 categories pertaining to these two core insights of financial capability and subjective financial wellbeing.
Insights from the 2025 report can be found here.
