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Ask the question three different ways and you get three different answers. In the Federal Reserve's latest survey, 63% of US adults said they would cover a surprise $400 expense with cash or its equivalent — and 12% said they could not pay it at all. In Great Britain, a quarter of adults told the ONS their household could not pay an unexpected £850 bill. Across the EU, 29% of people lived in a household that could not meet an unexpected expense out of its own resources.
Those three numbers describe the same underlying worry and they are not interchangeable. This report pulls together the published emergency-savings measures from the Federal Reserve, the FCA, the ONS, Eurostat, the OECD, the World Bank, the CFPB and FINRA, shows what each one actually asked, and is explicit about where the comparisons break down. The honest headline is not a ranking. It is that the gap between "has a buffer" and "does not" sits somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of adults in every wealthy country with published data — and that the exact figure you quote depends almost entirely on which question you pick.
Methodology, and what is not comparable
Eight surveys, eight different instruments.
- Federal Reserve SHED — the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, fielded 17–28 October 2025 among nearly 13,000 US adults and published in May 2026. Source of the $400 question and the three-month rainy day fund question.
- FCA Financial Lives — the UK regulator's flagship survey, 17,950 UK adults, fieldwork 5 February to 16 June 2024, published May 2025.
- ONS Opinions and Lifestyle Survey — a monthly Great Britain survey; the May 2026 round had 3,780 responding individuals and a 43% response rate.
- Eurostat EU-SILC — the EU statistics on income and living conditions, indicator
ilc_mdes04, 2025 survey year, all-household basis. - OECD/INFE 2023 — an international financial literacy survey covering 39 countries and economies, 68,826 adults aged 18–79, collected 2022–23.
- World Bank Global Findex — the global financial inclusion database, most recent edition 2025.
- CFPB Making Ends Meet — the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's household survey, fielded January 2024, 4,486 respondents.
- FINRA National Financial Capability Study — the sixth edition, 2024 data, 25,539 US adults, published July 2025.
Five things make these non-comparable, and they matter more than any individual number:
The thresholds differ. $400 is not £850 is not "an unexpected financial expense" is not "three months of living costs". A household that would struggle with three months of rent might absorb a $400 car repair without blinking. Putting 63% next to 25% next to 29% and calling it a league table would be meaningless.
The populations differ. SHED, the FCA and the OECD measure adults. Eurostat measures people living in households. The CFPB measures households. The ONS covers Great Britain, not the UK.
The years differ. The FCA reading is dated May 2024, from fieldwork running February to June that year. SHED is October 2025. The ONS reading is May 2026. Eurostat is the 2025 survey year, the CFPB survey is January 2024, and the OECD collection ran 2022–23. Something like three and a half years separates the oldest reading here from the newest, which is a long time in household finances.
All of it is self-reported. Every figure here is what a person said when asked. None of it is a measured bank balance. People misremember, round up, and answer hypotheticals differently from how they behave when the boiler actually breaks. Read every percentage in this report as "the share of adults who said", not "the share of adults who could".
Even the same question, asked twice, disagrees. The Fed put the share of US adults with a three-month rainy day fund at 55% in both 2024 and 2025. FINRA's National Financial Capability Study, asking about rainy day funds covering three months of expenses, put it at 46% for 2024. Nine percentage points, same country, same year, near-identical construct, both large and reputable. That spread is the best available guide to how much precision any of these headline numbers really carry.
Four questions about the same worry
Each figure comes from a different survey with a different threshold — they are not steps on one scale
Source: Federal Reserve Board, SHED 2025, Savings and Investments; Office for National Statistics, Opinions and Lifestyle Survey, 6–31 May 2026; Eurostat, Dataset ilc_mdes04, 2025 survey year
The $400 question, and the thirteen-year series behind it
The Fed's $400 question is the most-cited financial resilience statistic in the world, and it is almost always quoted wrongly. The Federal Reserve publishes the positive form: in 2025, 63% of adults said they would cover a hypothetical $400 emergency expense exclusively using cash, savings, or a credit card paid off at the next statement. The widely-repeated converse — that 37% could not — is arithmetically fine, but it gets stretched into "37% of Americans can't afford a $400 emergency", which the data does not say. Of that 37%, some would put it on a card and pay it over time, some would borrow from family, some would sell something. The share who said they would be unable to pay the expense by any means is 12%.
The value of this series is its length. It has been asked the same way since 2013.
US adults who would cover a $400 emergency with cash or its equivalent
Thirteen years of the Federal Reserve's SHED question, 2013 to 2025
- Would cover with cash or equivalent
Show the data
| Period | Would cover with cash or equivalent |
|---|---|
| 2013 | 50% |
| 2014 | 53% |
| 2015 | 54% |
| 2016 | 56% |
| 2017 | 59% |
| 2018 | 61% |
| 2019 | 63% |
| 2020 | 64% |
| 2021 | 68% |
| 2022 | 63% |
| 2023 | 63% |
| 2024 | 63% |
| 2025 | 63% |
Source: Federal Reserve Board, SHED, Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2025
Four flat years is the finding. Not a crisis, not a recovery — a plateau, at a level roughly matching where the series stood in 2019. Anyone claiming emergency savings have collapsed or rebounded since 2022 is not reading this chart.
The three-month test is a much harder test
A $400 shock is a bad week. Losing your income is a bad year, and it is the scenario the standard "three to six months of expenses" rule is built around. Every source that asks the harder question gets a bleaker answer.
The Fed reports that 55% of US adults said they had set aside money for three months of expenses in an emergency or rainy day fund — unchanged on 2024 and below the 59% peak of 2021. Separately, 30% of all US adults said they could not cover three months of expenses by any means, including borrowing or selling assets. In the UK, the FCA found 42% of adults had a limited savings buffer, meaning they could not cover their living expenses for three months or more if they lost their main source of household income.
Across the 39 countries and economies in the OECD's survey, only 43% said they could cover three months. That is one instrument applied in the same form in almost every market, which makes the country spread far more comparable than anything else in this report — with one exception, Spain, whose figure comes from an earlier sample and an earlier questionnaire and is flagged below.
One question, one survey, nine countries
The OECD/INFE 2023 survey is the only instrument in this report applied in the same form across markets — Spain excepted, as noted below. Overall average across all 39 participating countries and economies: 43%.
Adults who could cover living expenses for at least three months without their main source of income
- DEGermany75.4%2022–23 collectionOECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
- ESSpain72.6%2021 sample, older questionnaireSpain's data comes from a 2021 sample using the OECD's earlier toolkit and is not strictly comparable with the rest.OECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
- SESweden67.1%2022–23 collectionOECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
- IEIreland62.1%2022–23 collectionOECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
- NLNetherlands60.0%2022–23 collectionOECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
- ITItaly44.8%2022–23 collectionOECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
- FRFrance44.3%2022–23 collectionOECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
- GRGreece33.6%2022–23 collectionOECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
- PLPoland27.0%2022–23 collectionOECD/INFE 2023 International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy, Annex D Table 4.4
The spread across these nine — 75% in Germany against 27% in Poland — is larger than anything the headline resilience statistics suggest, and it is not explained by income alone. It is a reminder that comparing a US figure against a UK figure taken from two different surveys tells you approximately nothing.
Europe's version of the question
Eurostat's EU-SILC survey asks whether a household can meet an unexpected financial expense out of its own resources. It is the closest EU-wide equivalent to the $400 question, and it is not the same question: there is no single fixed cash amount, and it counts people living in households rather than adults answering for themselves.
In the 2025 survey year, Eurostat put the EU-wide figure at 29.2%, ranging from 15.3% in the Netherlands to 50.5% in Greece. A more than threefold gap between the best and worst member states is the real story in that dataset, and it is why a single "European" number is close to useless to anyone budgeting in a particular country. Coverage is EU and EFTA only, so there is no UK, US, Canadian or Australian figure on this indicator at all.
One filtering trap is worth naming, because it produces a much scarier number from the same table. Break the dataset down by household composition and single-person households come out far worse: 36.8% across the EU27, against 29.2% on the all-household basis quoted above. A figure quoted without saying which base it uses cannot be compared with one that does.
The Netherlands is the clearest illustration of why you cannot mix instruments. It is the most resilient country in the EU on Eurostat's unexpected-expense measure, at 15.3%. On the OECD's three-month test, 60% of Dutch adults said they could cover three months without their main income — meaning four in ten said they could not. Both are correct. They are measuring different things, and the three-month version is a far harder test.
Britain, in more detail than anywhere else
The FCA's Financial Lives survey is the most granular emergency-savings dataset any regulator publishes, and it lets you see the buffer as a ladder rather than a single threshold.
UK adults, by savings and resilience measure
FCA Financial Lives, fieldwork February to June 2024, 17,950 UK adults
Source: Financial Conduct Authority, Financial Lives 2024, key findings; Financial Conduct Authority, Financial Lives 2024, cash savings
Two of these deserve emphasis. First, 9% of adults could not cover their living expenses for even one week — a figure that rises to 29% for lone parents and 19% for renters. Second, among the 90% of UK adults who did have cash savings, the median amount held was between £5,000 and £6,000. The FCA reports that as a band rather than a point estimate, which is itself a small lesson in how much precision these surveys can honestly claim.
More recently, the ONS found in May 2026 that 25% of adults said their household would be unable to pay an unexpected but necessary expense of £850, and that 35% thought they would be unable to save any money at all over the next 12 months. That second figure is an expectation, not a record of behaviour — but it is the closest thing available to a forward-looking read.
The data that does not exist
A report like this is more useful if it says where the evidence runs out.
The World Bank's Global Findex is the obvious source for a genuine global comparison of who could raise emergency funds. It cannot be used for one. The 2024 Findex round did not field the saving, borrowing or financial-resilience modules in high-income economies — those cells are blank in the country tables. The most recent comparable saving figures for the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and Australia are from the 2021 reference year, when between 61% and 69% of adults in those five countries saved formally using an account, with Australia highest at 69.2% and the UK lowest at 61.0%. Anyone presenting a 2024 Findex emergency-funds number for a wealthy country is quoting something that was not collected.
Similarly, there is no Eurostat unexpected-expense figure for the UK, the US, Canada or Australia — the indicator is EU and EFTA only. And the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand skipped the OECD/INFE round entirely. There is no single dataset that answers "which rich country is most resilient", and the reason is boring: the surveys were never designed to be joined up.
Where to actually keep it
Two practical constraints govern an emergency fund: it has to be reachable within days, and it has to be somewhere a bank failure cannot touch it. The two markets this report covers in most detail each have a statutory limit.
Deposit protection limits
- Raised from £85,000 on 1 December 2025
- Covers banks, building societies and credit unions authorised in the UK
- Temporary high balances covered up to £1.4m for six months after events such as a house sale or inheritance
- Brands sharing one banking licence count as a single firm for the limit
- Automatic at any FDIC-insured bank — no application needed
- Ownership categories stack, so joint and single accounts are covered separately
- Limit has been $250,000 since 2008 and permanent since 2010
Source: Financial Services Compensation Scheme, Deposit limit increase, effective 1 December 2025; FDIC, Deposit Insurance, verified August 2026
For almost every household an emergency fund sits far below either limit, so the more consequential decision is what the money earns. Leaving it in the account it landed in is expensive.
What cash earns, if you move it and if you don't
Three markets, three different official measures — read the within-market gaps, not the cross-market ones
Source: Bank of England, Effective interest rates, June 2026; FDIC, National Rates and Rate Caps, July 2026; Central Bank of Ireland, Retail Interest Rate Statistics, May 2026
One catch worth naming: fixed-term deposits and CDs pay more precisely because the money is locked up, which cuts directly against what an emergency fund is for. The usual resolution is to split it — enough in instant access to handle a boiler or a car, the rest somewhere better-paying. Where to keep an emergency fund goes through the account types in more detail.
What this means for your budget
The data does not tell you what to do. It does narrow the sensible options.
Pick your own threshold before you pick a target. The surveys ask about $400, £850 and three months because those are useful population benchmarks, not because they are your number. Your number is your genuine monthly outgoings multiplied by the months you want covered, and the fixed part of those outgoings is larger than most people assume — the six published UK bills that arrive whatever you do come to about £455 a month before rent or mortgage. Work out the first part with a budget categories list and the second with the emergency fund calculator.
Treat the first £1,000 as a separate goal. 31% of UK adults have less than £1,000 in cash savings, and the FCA's own resilience ladder shows the sharpest distress is concentrated in that band. A four-figure buffer will not survive redundancy, but it absorbs the overwhelming majority of the shocks that push people onto credit — and credit is where the cost shows up, with UK arranged overdrafts quoted at 34.55% and cards at 24.71% in July 2026, so a boiler repair put on the wrong line costs several times what it would on another. Get there first, then extend. How much emergency fund do I need works through the maths for different household types.
Automate the transfer rather than tracking towards it. This is the one place where there is causal-ish evidence rather than survey opinion. The CFPB's analysis of savings-app data found that guaranteed saving rules — save a set amount every payday — were associated with a 1.5 to 3.5 times larger increase in the maximum amount saved within a year than spending-contingent rules like rounding up purchases. The rounding-up approach was used by 81% of savings goals; the payday approach by 41%. The popular strategy is not the effective one. That is the whole argument for paying yourself first. Note the caveat: this is observational analysis of app data, not a randomised trial.
Give the fund a line in the budget, not the leftovers. The ONS finding that 35% of GB adults expect to save nothing over the next year is a statement about how budgets are structured as much as about income. It also sits oddly next to the UK household saving ratio of 8.9% for the same period, and the resolution is that a national saving rate is an aggregate generated by a minority of households rather than a description of a typical one. If saving is whatever happens to be left at the end of the month, it usually does not happen — the CFPB's Making Ends Meet survey found in January 2024 that 33% of US consumers rarely or never have money left over at the end of the month, and 42% of households could cover expenses for a month or less if they lost their main income, using every resource available including borrowing and selling assets. Assigning the money on payday instead is the entire point of the 50/30/20 rule and every rule like it.
Set a date, not just an amount. A £6,000 target with no deadline is a wish. £250 a month for two years is a plan, and the savings goal calculator will tell you which monthly figure gets you there. If you want the full sequence — buffer, debt, then long-term saving — the emergency fund guide sets it out in order.
The bottom line
Somewhere between a quarter and two-fifths of adults in wealthy countries would struggle with an unexpected bill, depending entirely on how big a bill you name and who you ask. The measure has been flat in the United States for four years. It is worse for renters, lone parents and people on low incomes in every dataset that breaks it down. And every one of these numbers is what people said about a hypothetical, which means the true figure is unknown and probably not flattering.
None of that changes the individual answer, which is unglamorous: decide the amount, automate the transfer, keep it somewhere protected and reachable, and stop checking it.
If you want to see your own version of these numbers rather than the national ones, iBudget will track what you actually spend each month and turn that into a target figure. It is free to start, and no bank connection is required.
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