Understanding the cost-of-living crisis: weekly spending

Weekly transaction data from around 5 million current accounts, covering June 2024 to October 2025, which was one of the most financially pressured periods in recent memory. Breaks expenditure down into essentials, committed costs, discretionary spending, and quality-of-life categories, drawn from real bank records. A detailed record of how individuals’ budgets were affected.

Data Service: Financial Data Service
Coverage: England, Scotland, Wales
Time period: June 2024 – October 2025
Access: Controlled (Accessed through a Trusted Research Environment)

What it is

‘Spend Dynamics’ is a weekly consumer spending dataset drawn from anonymised personal current account records from a major UK high street bank, covering around 5 million account holders.

It records actual expenditure, broken down into essential spending (food, utilities, transport), committed spending (mortgage and rent payments), discretionary spending, and quality-of-life categories.

Covering June 2024 to October 2025, it provides a detailed view of how individuals’ spending patterns shifted in response to sustained economic pressure during that period.

Explore the dataset

How researchers can use it

Measure the week-by-week impact of cost-of-living pressures on people’s budgets
Analyse how spending patterns differ across income groups, demographic profiles, or geographies, and how those gaps widen or narrow over time.
Study the relationship between rental and mortgage costs and household spending capacity, using actual payment data rather than survey estimates.
Examine consumer responses to economic shocks such as energy price rises, interest rate changes, or benefit adjustments, week by week.

How policymakers can use it

Monitor whether cost-of-living interventions reached target areas and affected spending behaviour.
Identify groups or areas where financial resilience was weakest, to inform the design of future targeted support programmes.
Provides evidence on people’s financial behaviour that goes beyond what surveys or administrative data alone can reveal.
Support local authorities and housing bodies in understanding how rent and mortgage pressures translated into changed spending across their areas.

Example research project

Young people in the UK face unprecedented economic challenges that have fundamentally reshaped how they manage finances. Rising living costs, housing insecurity, and precarious employment force difficult choices between essentials, delay life milestones, and increase reliance on credit. Yet policies and financial services remain poorly calibrated to these realities as they rely on self-reported indicators and aggregate analyses that obscure how young people experience financial stress and how they cope.

A FINDS Fellowship project, led by Eugenia Wong at the University of Edinburgh, will use FINDS income and spending dynamics data to produce the first comprehensive, transaction-based evidence on youth financial vulnerability and develop a Youth Financial Vulnerability Index for ongoing policy monitoring.

Access and availability

Available via the Financial Data Service secure research environment. Access is subject to application and approval. Researchers must demonstrate a legitimate research purpose and agree to data use conditions.

Powered by SDR UK

This dataset demonstrates the value of SDR UK’s data infrastructure. By providing secure, privacy-protected access to consumer banking data at scale, SDR UK enables researchers to unlock the power of smart data to improve lives. The Financial Data Service negotiated access to pseudonymised transactional records on behalf of the research community, handling the data agreements, governance, and secure environment that individual research teams could not feasibly arrange on their own.