Personal Savings Rate Statistics (2026)

The personal saving rate is personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income, income after taxes. It is the share of every after-tax dollar that Americans, in aggregate, do not spend.

One caveat that shapes every figure here: it is a macro residual (income minus outlays for the whole economy), not a survey of how much a typical family sets aside. It tells you the national picture, not your neighbor's budget.

Americans are saving very little right now. The rate was 3.0% in May 2026, and dipped to 2.6% in April, among the lowest readings in the post-2005 record and well under the roughly 8.4% long-run average (see the chart and table below).

That is a notable slide from the 5-7% range of 2023-2024, as households spent down savings and stretched to keep up with prices.

The monthly path in 2026 has trended down: 4.5% in January, 2.6% in April, and 3.0% in May, translating to about $704 billion of saving at an annual rate (see the table below).

Month-to-month swings are normal, driven by the timing of income, taxes, and one-off spending, so the trend matters more than any single reading.

Zoom out and the story is a decades-long slide. The saving rate averaged about 12% in the 1970s, its highest decade, then fell to about 7.5% in the 1990s and just 4% in the 2000s at the height of the housing-bubble wealth effect (see the chart and table below).

The 2020s average of about 8.7% looks like a rebound, but it is entirely an artifact of the pandemic stimulus spike; strip that out and the underlying trend remains in the low-to-mid single digits.

The rate's extremes bracket two very different eras. The all-time low of 1.4% came in July 2005, when rising home values made households feel rich enough to spend nearly everything (see the table below).

The all-time high of 32% came in April 2020: stimulus checks arrived while lockdowns eliminated places to spend, so saving briefly consumed a third of income. Before the pandemic, the record was 17.3% back in 1975.

The 2020-2021 spike was without precedent. The rate exceeded 10% every month from March 2020 through April 2021 and hit a second peak of 25.9% in March 2021 on the next round of stimulus.

The post-onset pandemic average ran about 17.9%, versus roughly 7.25% in the decade before. Households were, briefly, saving at rates not seen since the mid-20th century.

All that saving created a cushion, and then it was spent. Households accumulated roughly $2.1 trillion in excess savings through August 2021, which they drew down at an accelerating pace, about $100 billion a month through 2022 (see the table below).

By early 2023 about $1.6 trillion was gone, leaving around $500 billion, and that too was largely exhausted by late 2023. The disappearance of this buffer is a big part of why the saving rate has since fallen so low.

By international standards, Americans are poor savers. On the OECD's household measure, the US rate of about 4.9% trails Switzerland (~19%), Sweden (~16%), and most of Western Europe (see the chart and table below).

The comparison is imperfect, the OECD uses a net-disposable-income basis that is not identical to the BEA's gross rate, so treat it as a relative ranking. But the gap is wide enough that the conclusion holds: US households save a smaller share of income than nearly any developed peer.

Several forces hold the rate down. Housing is a big one: about 33% of US households were cost-burdened in 2023, spending more than 30% of income on rent or a mortgage, leaving less to save.

There is also a wealth effect: as stock and home values rise, households feel less need to hold cash, and consumer spending makes up roughly 70% of the US economy, so a culture of spending is structurally baked in.

The aggregate rate hides a stark split. A BEA-BLS distributional study found the bottom 50% of the income distribution had negative net saving in 2022, meaning they spent more than they earned, while higher earners did the saving.

The emergency-savings gap tells the same story: only about 24% of adults earning under $25,000 have a three-month emergency fund, versus about 75% of those earning $100,000 or more. A low national rate is really a story about who has any margin at all.

Part of the decline reflects where savings go, not whether they exist. The share of household assets held in stocks rose from 15.2% in 2019 to 20.0% in 2022, as more families invested rather than parked cash.

Money moved into markets is not counted the same way as cash set aside, and rising asset values reduce the felt need to save income. In that sense a low cash-saving rate partly reflects a more invested, more market-exposed household, for better and worse.

The national rate is a macro gauge, not personal advice, but the takeaways are practical. Because the aggregate rate is low and the pandemic cushion is gone, many households have little margin for a shock.

The durable fixes are the boring ones: build an emergency fund (aim for three to six months of expenses), automate a fixed percentage of every paycheck into savings and investments so it happens before you can spend it, and treat saving as a bill, not a leftover.