Financial Literacy Statistics (2026)

By the most rigorous measure, not very, and not improving. US adults answered just 49% of the questions on the TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index correctly in 2025, and that figure hasn't budged from 49% in 2017.

Eight years, nine annual surveys, zero net progress. No generation, on average, even cleared 60%. Financial literacy is stuck at a level where the typical American gets barely half of basic money questions right.

The most famous financial-literacy test is the "Big Three" from economists Lusardi and Mitchell, covering compound interest, inflation, and risk diversification. Only about a third of Americans answer all three correctly.

Put the other way: by this standard, two-thirds of Americans are not financially literate. The questions are genuinely basic (does a diversified fund carry less risk than a single stock?), which makes the low pass rate all the more striking.

Literacy rises steadily with age. Gen Z scored just 38% on the P-Fin Index, versus 46% for millennials, 51% for Gen X, and 55% for boomers and the Silent Generation (see the chart and table below).

The gap at the bottom is stark: 37% of Gen Z fall into the "very low" literacy band (7 or fewer of 28 questions right), versus only 10% of the Silent Generation. Financial knowledge, it seems, is largely learned through experience over a lifetime.

Literacy also splits along gender and racial lines. Men answered 53% of questions correctly versus 45% for women, an 8-point gap that shows up across countries (see the table below).

By race, White (53%) and Asian (low 50s) adults scored well above Black (38%) and Hispanic (39%) adults, a 14-15 point gap. These gaps mirror, and help perpetuate, the wealth gaps documented on our wealth inequality page.

A second major measure, the FINRA Foundation's quiz, tells the same story and adds a worrying trend. Only 27% of adults answered 5 or more of 7 questions correctly in 2024, and just 4% got all seven right (see the table below).

The share answering the "core 5" questions correctly fell from 42% in 2009 to 32% today. On this measure, financial knowledge has actually declined over 15 years, even as the financial products people must navigate have grown more complex.

Not all topics are equal. On the P-Fin Index, the lowest-scoring area is comprehending risk, just 36% correct, and it has slipped since 2017. The highest-scoring is borrowing and managing debt at 60%.

That pattern is telling: Americans know the most about debt, which they deal with constantly, and the least about risk, which is exactly the concept that matters most for investing well. Insuring and investing also score below the 49% average.

There is one encouraging trend: inflation knowledge improved, likely because everyone lived through it. The share answering the inflation question correctly rose from 53% in 2021 to 58% in 2024, with the biggest gain among young adults, 18-34-year-olds jumped from 34% to 44% (see the table below).

It's a reminder that financial literacy can rise, real-world experience taught a generation about inflation faster than any classroom. The challenge is teaching the other concepts before people learn them the hard way.

A specific weak spot is retirement knowledge. US adults answered just 37% of retirement-fluency questions correctly, covering Social Security, Medicare, and life expectancy, the very topics needed to plan a secure retirement.

Even boomers, closest to retirement and highest-scoring, answered fewer than half correctly. This knowledge gap is a big reason so many households reach retirement underprepared, as our retirement savings statistics show.

Globally, the US is middling. On the S&P Global financial-literacy survey, 57% of US adults were financially literate, ranking the country 14th in the world, behind the Nordic leaders (Norway, Denmark, Sweden) at 71% (see the chart above).

The world average is just 33%, meaning about 3.5 billion adults lack basic financial understanding. (This cross-country benchmark is from 2014, the most recent comprehensive global comparison, so treat the exact ranking as dated even though the pattern holds.)

Within the US, financial knowledge varies by state, though the range is narrow. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and DC top the FINRA rankings, with about 34-35% answering 5+ of 7 questions correctly (see the table below).

Even the best states hover around a third passing, underscoring that low literacy is a nationwide problem, not a regional one. Geography matters far less here than age, education, and income.

The most hopeful development is in schools. As of late 2025, 30 states guarantee all high schoolers a standalone personal-finance course before graduation, double the 15 states in 2022 (see the chart above).

The push, led by advocacy groups aiming for all students by 2030, is a bet that teaching the basics early can finally move the stubborn 49% literacy rate. Whether it works will show up in the P-Fin scores of the next decade.

Low financial literacy isn't an abstract problem, it maps directly onto financial hardship. Adults with very low literacy are twice as likely to be debt-constrained, three times as likely to be financially fragile, and five times as likely to lack emergency savings (see the table below).

The fragility is widespread: 62% of Gen Z lack even one month of savings, and 41% couldn't produce $2,000 for an emergency. Meanwhile only 46% of all adults have three months of savings, down from 53% in 2021. Knowledge gaps and money problems reinforce each other.

The encouraging truth buried in this data is that financial literacy is learnable, and the highest-value concepts are few. The Big Three, compound interest, inflation, and diversification, plus a grasp of fees and index investing, cover most of what actually drives good outcomes.

You don't need to ace a 28-question index to build wealth; you need to internalize a handful of durable ideas: start early (compounding), spread risk (diversify), keep costs low (index funds), and hold an emergency fund. Those basics, applied consistently, matter far more than financial sophistication, which is exactly why closing the literacy gap is one of the highest-return investments a person, or a country, can make.