A growing share of lower-income Americans are struggling to get by financially as their wages fail to keep up with inflation, according to a recent analysis.
Roughly 29% of lower-income households are living paycheck to paycheck, up slightly from 2024 and from 27.1% in 2023, data from the Bank of America Institute shows. The financial firm defines that as spending more than 95% of household income on necessities such as housing, gasoline, groceries, utility bills and internet service.
In 2025, nearly a quarter of all U.S. households lived paycheck to paycheck, Bank of America estimates.
It’s the real/non-propaganda number. The huge numbers you often see define “paycheck to paycheck” as simply ‘not saving any money’, but that includes people who make plenty of money, and just spend it all (by this definition, 1/4 of people earning at least six figures “live paycheck to paycheck”), and there are simply many more of those than there are people actually barely getting by. On the other hand:
This is a much more accurate definition of “living paycheck to paycheck”.
I started making 6 figures (barely. Literally salaried at 100k) a few years ago, from poverty wages. I get why people struggle around 100k. Its almost enough, but not quite, to comfortably live the american dream.
It allowed me to barely afford a decent house where i live instead of perpetually renting. If I did not have low rent before, that probably wouldn’t have happened either way.
Now I am tied to my job no matter how unhappy I am until I can afford some sort of change. Whenever that will be.
These cost of living increases are making things significantly more difficult, but I can’t imagine how it’d be if I was never given any sort of a break.
Makes me more sympathetic, and far more angry with this shit, knowing that I was probably one bad day away from being homeless instead.