25 posts on "Survey of Consumer Expectations"
May 27, 2026
Food Insecurity and Consumer Pessimism
Current discussions regarding a bifurcated U.S. economy highlight the increasing economic divide between lower- and higher-income Americans in spending and earnings growth and wealth accumulation. While many households are doing fine and economic activity overall has been expanding at a solid pace, large segments of the population are facing high levels of economic insecurity and financial strain, and consumer sentiment on the whole has dropped to low levels. In this post, we use newly collected data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) to update our 2020 analysis of disproportionate financial hardship experienced during the early pandemic and to investigate recent changes in food insecurity and broader economic strains. We then examine how food insecurity relates to the increase in consumer pessimism. We find a remarkable increase in food insecurity, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income households and households with young children. We document a contemporaneous increase in pessimism among the same groups, along with a sharp decline in job-finding expectations.
April 14, 2026
Use of Gen AI in the Workplace and the Value of Access to Training
The rapid spread of generative AI (AI) tools is reshaping the workplace at a remarkable rate. Yet relatively little is known about whether workers have access to these tools, how the tools affect workers’ daily productivity, and how much workers value the training needed to use the tools effectively. In this post, we shed light on these issues by drawing on supplemental questions in the November 2025 Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), fielded to a representative sample of the U.S. population. We find that adoption of AI tools at work is heterogeneous, that a sizable share of workers see AI training as important, and that a significant share of employers are nonetheless not yet providing access to AI tools or training on how to use them.
October 14, 2025
Consumption Sensitivity of Uncertain Households
Uncertainty is a key component of everyday economic decisions of consumers and, perhaps not surprisingly, it plays a central role in economic models. According to economic theory, forward-looking consumers rely on their expectations and perceived uncertainty when making economic decisions. Nevertheless, measuring the uncertainty that households actually perceive, and how it affects consumer behavior, is challenging. The probabilistic nature of the Survey of Consumer Expectations enables us to make progress on this subject and to construct household-specific time-varying uncertainty. In our recent Staff Report, we empirically show that the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) is increasing and concave in perceived uncertainty. This novel empirical evidence poses a challenge for the conventional consumption-savings model with incomplete markets.
April 11, 2025
Recent Shifts Seen in Consumers’ Public Policy Expectations
In this post we examine changes in households’ beliefs following the release of the December 2024 SCE Public Policy Survey, finding large shifts in consumer expectations about future changes in fiscal policy. Households assign higher likelihoods to a variety of tax cuts and to reductions in a range of transfer programs, while they assign lower likelihoods to tax hikes and expansions in entitlement programs. We do not find these sharp changes translate into meaningful shifts in median households’ near-term expectations about the evolution of the overall economy, nor do they appear to have significantly affected median near-term expectations about the household’s own income and spending growth.
Posted at 7:00 am in Expectations, Fiscal Policy, Household Finance, Inflation, Student Loans | Permalink
October 2, 2024
Exposure to Generative AI and Expectations About Inequality
With the rise of generative AI (genAI) tools such as ChatGPT, many worry about the tools’ potential displacement effects in the labor market and the implications for income inequality. In supplemental questions to the February 2024 Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), we asked a representative sample of U.S. residents about their experience with genAI tools. We find that relatively few people have used genAI, but that those who have used it have a bleaker outlook on its impacts on jobs and future inequality.
Posted at 9:00 am in AI , Employment, Expectations, Human Capital, Inequality | Permalink | Comments (1)
April 16, 2024
The Survey of Consumer Expectations: A Look Back at the Past Decade
It has been a little over ten years since we started releasing findings from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE). In this post, we review some of the headline findings from the first decade of the survey’s history, highlighting the evolution of consumers’ expectations about inflation and labor market outcomes.
Posted at 7:00 am in Expectations | Permalink
October 18, 2023
Borrower Expectations for the Return of Student Loan Repayment
After forty-three months of forbearance, the pause on federal student loan payments has ended. Originally enacted at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the administrative forbearance and interest waiver lasted until September 1, 2023, and borrowers’ monthly payments resumed this month. As discussed in an accompanying post, the pause on student loan payments afforded borrowers over $260 billion in waived payments throughout the pandemic, supporting borrowers’ consumption and savings over the last three years. In this post, we analyze responses of student loan borrowers to special questions in the August 2023 SCE Household Spending Survey designed to gauge the expected impact of the payment resumption on future spending growth, the risk of credit delinquency for borrowers, and the economy at large. The findings suggest that the payment resumption will have a relatively small overall effect on consumption, on the order of a 0.1 percentage point reduction in aggregate spending from August levels, and a (delayed) return of student loan delinquency rates back to pre-pandemic levels. Across groups, we see little variation in spending responses but find that low-income borrowers, female borrowers, those with less than a bachelor’s degree, and those who were not in repayment before the pandemic expect the highest likelihood of missed student loan payments.
June 22, 2023
Elevated Rent Expectations Continue to Pressure Low‑Income Households
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s 2023 SCE Housing Survey, released in April, reported some novel data about expectations for home prices, interest rates, and mortgage refinancing. While the data showed a sharp drop in home price expectations, some of the most notable findings concern renters. In this post, we take a deeper dive into how renters’ expectations and financial situations have evolved over the past year. We find that both owners and renters expect rents to rise rapidly over the next year, albeit at a slower pace than last year. Furthermore, we also show that eviction expectations rose sharply over the past twelve months, and that this increase was most pronounced for those in the lowest quartile of the income distribution.
October 11, 2022
New SCE Charts Include a Measure of Longer‑Term Inflation Expectations
Today, the New York Fed introduces several new data series and interactive charts depicting findings from its Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE). The SCE is a representative, internet-based monthly survey of a rotating panel of about 1,300 household heads in the United States. Since January 2014, we have been reporting findings from our monthly survey on U.S. households’ views on inflation, household income and spending growth, their expectations about the housing and labor market, and a range of other expectations about the economy and outcomes for their own household. In addition to publishing interactive charts showing national trends as well as trends by demographic groups (such as age, income, education, numeracy, and geography), we also post the underlying microdata online (with a nine-month lag) to make it available for research purposes. We are adding three new data series to our interactive charts today. The first two concern expectations about future inflation, and the third concerns expectations of future home price growth.
May 26, 2022
What Do Consumers Think Will Happen to Inflation?
This post provides an update on two earlier blog posts (here and here) in which we discuss how consumers’ views about future inflation have evolved in a continually changing economic environment. Using data from the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE), we show that while short-term inflation expectations have continued to trend upward, medium-term inflation expectations appear to have reached a plateau over the past few months, and longer-term inflation expectations have remained remarkably stable. Not surprisingly given recent movements in consumer prices, we find that most respondents agree that inflation will remain high over the next year. In contrast, and somewhat surprisingly, there is a divergence in consumers’ medium-term inflation expectations, in the sense that we observe a simultaneous increase in both the share of respondents who expect high inflation and the share of respondents who expect low inflation (and even deflation) three years from now. Finally, we show that individual consumers have become more uncertain about what inflation will be in the near future. However, in contrast to the pre-pandemic period, they tend to express less uncertainty about inflation further in the future.
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