The Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) Debt Need Survey is an annual panel-based survey. It looks at attitudes towards debt advice and interactions with providers, how people feel about their household finances and money management in general, arrears on credit commitments and bills, use of high-cost credit, and adverse events/impacts (financial and personal). Multiple panels are used, ensuring a broad cross section of the population is surveyed, including socially deprived communities.

The survey questions and answers are grouped into the following sections:

• Basic demographic questions for quota/screening (age, sex, location, ethnicity)
• Over-indebtedness and advice seeking
• Method of advice seeking, service used and response received
• Need for debt advice (please see an explanation of this measure, at https://moneyandpensionsservice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/need-for-debt-advice-explanation-february-2022.pdf)
• Impact of COVID on personal finances
• Life events (work, money, health, family)
• Demographics (e.g. education, tenure, household composition, employment status, social grade, marital status, income, religion, sexual orientation, health)

There are more than 1000 fields/variables in the surveys, with different groups of fields enumerated based on a participant’s response to early questions. Please see the variable description CSV for a summary of the questions asked.

Content

We hold the anonymised individual records containing the responses from each survey participant.

The four editions of the survey (2020 to 2023) are broadly similar in terms of question content making them suitable for comparisons, while evolving slightly to reflect changes in society. For example, the 2022 survey included new questions relating to Buy Now Pay Later products.

The survey answers are available as, for each year, two record-level CSVs (one with codes and one with labels) or as an SPSS file. There is also a code to label lookup file, a questionnaire copy and a technical report.

If using the CSV version of the data, it is important to apply the weighting factor, to make the data representative of the UK adult population. Please note the spatial unit supplied is UK region.

For detailed description of the columns contained within the data, see the Variable Dictionary; and for an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary. These files can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The survey is high-quality and organised by a consumer research firm on behalf of MaPS, accessing several user panels.

The survey includes quota/screening questions at the beginning to ensure a broadly representative sample of the population across the UK is included. Each respondent is assigned a weighting value which, when applied, should result in a survey that reflects the demographics of the UK.

N.B. The Debt Need Survey is sometimes referred to as the Debt Needs Survey.