CFI COVID-19 Survey of Consumers Data

To gain insights into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on financial security in the U.S., the Consumer Finance Institute (CFI) at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia conducted a series of national surveys of consumers beginning in April 2020 and concluding in April 2022. The 12 waves of the survey focused on changes in job status and personal financial security throughout the pandemic. This repository shares data relating to topics that were monitored since the beginning of the survey series in April 2020, specifically respondents’ ability to work at their jobs and their self-reported feelings of financial security.

The survey collected responses from a cross-sectional sample of U.S. adults. The survey was conducted by Dynata, an online market research firm providing access to survey panels that are nationally representative of the United States. Respondents completed a survey designed by CFI that collected information on income, employment, and financial security both before and after the COVID-19 crisis began. Responses were managed throughout the survey process to ensure appropriate representation of certain demographic groups (e.g., those with higher and lower incomes, urban and rural residents, and self-employed individuals).

To account for variances in core demographic distributions and to generate more level wave-to-wave comparisons, we have reweighted the results of each survey wave in these chart packs to reflect the income, age, and gender distributions of the 2020 American Community Survey. This allows a more direct comparison of high-level results across surveys. After reweighting, each wave now reflects identical distributions of income, age, and gender. All data referenced in this repository reflect the reweighted version of each wave’s results, unless specifically noted otherwise; therefore, values reported previously may be different than those referenced here.

Available Data

The materials provided below include charts and data tables for all waves of the survey broken out by four key demographic measures: 2019 Personal Income, Age, Gender, and Race/Ethnicity. 

For information about the survey questions that were asked to generate the data, download this file.