This study looks beyond generational labels to understand the factors that shape the financial lives and experiences of young adults, aged 18-34, and their potential financial futures.
The research draws on four data sources: StepChange client data, an online survey, interviews, and nationally representative polling, giving us both the scale of the challenge and the lived experience behind it.
It explores how financial difficulty begins, how debt escalates, and how young adults seek help — and crucially, what this means for all of us across financial services, housing, regulation, and the debt advice sector.
Young adults in recent times have entered adulthood during overlapping crises and the research finds that financial difficulty among young adults is driven by five interconnected factors:
- entering adulthood in difficult contexts
- cost of living pressures
- insecure or disrupted work
- health problems
- major life events that trigger debt
Among StepChange clients aged 18-34 who were surveyed, almost half (49%) were not earning enough to cover essential costs, and 44% had borrowed to make rent/mortgage payments in the last three years.
Three in four young adults (75%) surveyed first used credit before age 21, with overdrafts or credit cards the most typical form of credit used. While over two in five (43%) had a plan to repay when they took out the credit, over half (53%) later felt they “didn’t fully understand the risks and terms of the credit they used.”
Read the full report