Mar 7 -- The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Board) invites comment on a proposal to extend for three years, without revision, the Survey of Consumer Finances (FR 3059). Comments must be submitted on or before May 6, 2024.
This triennial survey is the only source of representative information on the structure of U.S. families' finances. The survey collects data on the assets, debts, income, work history, pension rights, use of financial services, and attitudes of a sample of U.S. families. Because the ownership of some assets is relatively concentrated in a small number of families, the survey makes a special effort to ensure proper representation of such assets by systematically oversampling wealthier families. For the 2025 survey, the Board will conduct: (1) up to 150 interviews averaging about 110 minutes (pretest) to be obtained in a test or series of tests of the survey procedures in 2025, and (2) up to 7,000 interviews averaging about 110 minutes (main survey) between April 2025 and March 2026.
The 2025 SCF will be the 15th triennial survey, which began in 1983, that provides comprehensive data on U.S. families concerning the distribution of assets and debts, along with related information and other data items necessary for analyzing financial behavior.
The SCF is expected to provide a core set of data on family income, assets, and liabilities. For the survey, the contractor and the Board will draw samples for the survey designed to obtain at most 7,000 completed interviews. The sample selected by the contractor will be an area-probability design, which is a type of geographically structured random sample that provides good national coverage of widely-distributed behavior. The sample selected by the Board will be drawn from statistical records derived from individual tax returns; this “list” sample will be designed to oversample wealthy households. Both samples will be selected in a way that is consistent with procedures used in earlier SCFs. When the two samples are combined and sample weights applied, the survey is representative of the number of households in the United States in the survey year. The 2022 SCF represented 131.3 million households.
The fieldwork for the pretest will be conducted during 2024. The fieldwork for the main survey will be conducted between April 2025 and March 2026. Very preliminary results from the main survey will be available to the Board in mid-2026.
The data to support the part of the survey sample selected by the Board will be provided by the Statistics of Income Division (SOI) of the Internal Revenue Service under a contract that allows this use of the data as well as other more limited uses of the data for statistical adjustments to the final data and related purposes. As in past surveys, the sample selection and survey administration will be managed by the contractor so that the Board would not be given any names of survey participants; SOI would not be given data to link survey responses with tax records; and the contractor would not be given income data derived from the tax returns.
SCF:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm
Draft supporting statement:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/apps/reportingforms/Download/DownloadAttachment?guid=3C884CC5-0453-4A22-BCB9-CFF52B4D7DC3
FRN:
https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-04888