The Financial Lives Survey (FLS) is a robust large-scale quantitative survey, conducted by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It establishes, from all respondents, levels of product ownership, in retail banking, retail investment, savings, credit including mortgages, general insurance and protection, and pension products. It also establishes the level of use of regulated financial advice (advice incidence) and has a section covering assets and debts. Each respondent is also allocated a single detailed question set about one product area (such as retail banking or first charge mortgages) based on their product holdings, or about advice.

Content and Size of the Data

The data available are microdata (individual responses) - there is no aggregated data, however the FCA website does included aggregated forms of this data, see the resource links below.

There are 2 datasets available:

• The anonymised individual responses from the Financial Lives Survey exercises that were carried out in 2024. The full data includes approximately 18,000 individual level records from across the UK.
• A tracker file of anonymised responses from the 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024 surveys for those variables that can be tracked from wave to wave.

Demographic data includes racial/ethnic origin, long-term health problems, sexual orientation, and what government benefits the participant is in receipt of.

Each available data collection (2024 full survey and tracker for 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024) contains two data files, (a values and labels version) a metadata file (codebook) to match up labels and values, and a weighting reference sheeting. A data user guide is also available to instruct users on how use the data.

In detail, the files are:

• labels/captions data file - Individual responses (full text version) - each field (response part) is delimited. Some fields contain multiple responses, these are sub-delimited. Please note that many of the records are very long.
• codes data file - A copy of the above, but using number codes instead, this is more compact to manage and process but requires a lookup file to convert to full text.
• codebook – a description of each data variable including data label, response code and response labels
• weighting reference sheets - A lookup file to indicate which type of weighting is applied to each column
• data user guide - A guide to the dataset and instruction on applying weights.

The first field in each data file is a unique identifier. While these are individual records, no personally identifying data are included. There are 9 files included in total: (4 data files (CSV format), 2 "codebook" datamaps/references (XLSX format), 2 weighting reference sheets (XLSX format) and 1 user guide (DOCX format)). The largest data file is 1.48GB. The files are delivered in a 227MB zip file. The data is also available in SPSS format (SAV files) if you specifically request it in this format.

Quality, Representation and Bias

The Financial Lives Survey uses random probability sampling to recruit respondents to a largely online survey, with a smaller number of interviews conducted over the phone, in order to include in the sample those without internet access and to increase the number of participants aged 70 and over. More details, including a full description of the content, survey methodology, please see the reports (technical and general) via the external links below.

Version History

• 1.0 - Initial release (2017 survey)
• 2.0 - 2020 survey added
• 3.0 - 2022 survey added, along with 2017/2020/2022 tracker files. The earlier full survey microdata is no longer available.
  • 3.1 - The tracker (2017/2020/2022) files were modified in June 2024 to correct an issue with the weightings, and also an incorrectly truncated file.
  • 3.2 - Minor updates to the files were made in May 2025, to remove a small number of irrelevant data fields.
  • 3.3 - The data is now available in SPSS-format files to successful applicants, upon request.
• 4.0 - 2024 survey added, along with 2027/2020/2022 tracker files.