Younger adults increasingly likely to report financial difficulty

A new time series analysis from Statistics Canada, created using Canadian Social Survey data, shows the percentage of Canadians reporting financial difficulty has steadily increased by 4.8 percentage points each year between 2021 and 2025.

This has occurred alongside decreases in the percentage of those reporting high life satisfaction (this is down 2.2 per cent) and hopefulness for the future (down 2.4 per cent).

Canada’s younger adults, those between 25 and 44 years of age, were increasingly likely to report that they’d experienced financial difficulty – this group’s financial difficulty reports were up 5.4 per cent over the same study period.

“Time series data can identify changes in subjective measures of well-being over time and identify groups that may experience greater declines in well-being,” Statistics Canada’s researchers write in the report, Stretching the loonie: A time series analysis of financial difficulty and quality of life. “The first 10 waves of the survey revealed steadily increasing levels of self-reported financial difficulty.”

As of the spring of 2025, they say 39 per cent of those over 15 years of age reported statistic that their household found it difficult or very difficult to meet their financial needs. This has more than doubled since the summer of 2021 when the figure was 19 per cent.

Both young adults and middle-aged adults in the study experienced similar worsening of financial difficulty over time – by 5.4 percentage points and 5.5 percentage points, respectively, while similar difficulty reports increased only 3.6 percentage points among those over age 65 during the same period.

Financial difficulty was more likely to be reported by urban adults, younger adults and those with a disability.

“Younger adults aged 25 to 44 were more likely than older age groups to report that they experienced financial difficulty in the previous 12 months (43 per cent, compared with 38 per cent of those aged 45 to 64 and 24 per cent of those aged 65 and older),” the report states. “People with a disability, difficulty or long-term condition were more likely to report experiencing financial difficulty (49 per cent) than those who did not report a condition or disability (33 per cent).”

They conclude, saying younger adults have been more vulnerable to social and economic changes in recent years. “Among all groups examined in the time series data, young adults who experienced financial difficulty were, in general, the most vulnerable group to poor subjective well-being.”