A new Federal Reserve survey offers a somber look at how young Americans are getting by: a lot with their parents’ help, from paying a phone bill to even living at home.
The data comes from the Fed’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, which found that 49% of adults ages 18 to 29 live with their parents, and another 47% of adults in that same age group received help from someone outside their household to pay an expense—money toward a cell phone bill, general living expenses, or housing costs. Notably, those aren’t the same population, according to Laura Ullrich, director of economics at Indeed Hiring Lab, who has studied household formation trends for years.
“You’ve got to think about this as a Venn diagram,” Ullrich told Fortune. “Forty-nine percent of them are living at home. 47% of them are getting help from someone outside their household, which doesn’t include those living at home. There’s a lot of adult children getting financial support from their parents.”
The data, based on the Fed’s Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED), is troubling for Ullrich, a former senior regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who has spent years studying household economic trends. Just last year, the stat was closer to 1 in 3 young adults living at home.
