How Much Financial Help Do People Give and Receive? Evidence from the Understanding America Survey

Financial and in-kind transfers occupy an important place in the household financial ecosystem.¹ It has long been recognized that bequests allow households to accumulate and maintain wealth across generations and that the desire to leave bequests is a potentially important saving motivation for older households.² Transfers can also help households insure each other against idiosyncratic shocks, such as job loss and illness. In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the increasing number of young adults living with their parents, which is considered an in-kind transfer often intended to help adult children facing low earnings and high housing costs.

Surveys containing data on transfers include:

• The Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), a cross-sectional survey collected every three years
• The Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a panel of individuals aged 51 and over and their spouses
• The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal survey starting with a nationally representative sample in 1968

Each study has significant value, but each one also has limitations. The SCF has detailed information on financial transfers, but it does not account for in-kind transfers.³ The HRS contains a broader set of variables — including measures of time transfers — but its focus is on older households.⁴ The PSID collected information on transfers in 1988 — nearly 40 years ago — and 2013. Our proposal more closely resembles the 1988 module from the PSID than the 2013 module, which collects data only on transfers between parents and children.⁵

To collect newer and more comprehensive data on transfers, we collaborated with Understanding America Study (UAS) staff in developing a series of questions about the transfers respondents gave or received in 2024. In this article, we describe the transfer module and present some summary statistics.

The Transfer Module

The UAS is a nationally representative panel of noninstitutionalized U.S. residents aged 18 or older.⁶ Data are collected online, with respondents lacking internet access given a tablet and/or an internet subscription. The study was founded in 2014 and currently contains about 14,000 respondents. The survey is regularly replenished with new respondents to offset attrition and to increase the panel's sample size.

The UAS administers a series of 24 core surveys to all panelists every two years. These surveys include the entire HRS questionnaire (administered to every respondent regardless of age) and other instruments eliciting information about individuals' personality, cognition and financial literacy, physical and mental health, labor force status and retirement preparedness, household financial situation, expenditures, and decision-making. The ability to combine new modules with existing data is an especially appealing feature, as it allows researchers to study how the new variables relate to a rich set of outcomes.

The transfer module supplements the core surveys with a new, custom-designed set of variables. The UAS administered the module between May 1 and August 2, 2025, with 7,934 people invited to take it and 5,934 (74 percent) completing the survey. The module presented respondents with a battery of potential transfers. Respondents were first asked about any transfers they had given: their purpose, to whom and the amount (in ranges). Respondents were then queried about any transfers they had received, also being asked about their purpose, from whom and the amount. Financial transfers were measured in dollars, transfers of time were measured in hours, and lodging was measured in days.

For each type of transfer, an array of potential counterparties was considered, including parents, grandparents, adult children, grandchildren, other relatives and acquaintances, with quantities recorded separately for each type of counterparty. Given that most individuals engaged in relatively few transfers, 97 percent of respondents completed the survey in 10 minutes or less.

Respondent Summary Statistics

Table 1 presents some sample means. The first column presents unweighted means for the entire sample. The second column presents means using the population weights provided by the UAS, using the 5,270 observations with nonzero weights.

The two sets of means are similar, with the most notable difference being that the unweighted sample contains fewer young (ages 18‑34) individuals. The modal respondent has an annual household income between $30,000 and $59,999, is White, is currently married and is between ages 35-54. However, many groups have substantial numbers of observations.

Financial Transfers by Purpose

Table 2 shows the incidence of financial transfers given or received, along with means and medians. We group transfers by purpose but do not differentiate by recipient (for givers) or giver (for recipients). Transfers are common, as 42 percent of respondents report giving some sort of transfer, while 21 percent report receiving one.

The imbalance between gifts and receipts may reflect actual incidence. For example, young people may be receiving transfers from both parents and grandparents. Alternatively, it may reflect selective memory. It bears noting that in most cases the quantities reported by recipients are larger than the quantities reported by givers.

By far the most common use of transfers was for paying bills, with 31 percent and 14 percent reporting having given or received help, respectively. The amounts transferred are the smallest of any category, with a median value of $600. This may reflect payments based on convenience, such as a family phone plan. However, even when we exclude bills, 30 percent and 16 percent of respondents gave or received transfers, respectively. The largest transfers involved housing or education — both known to be big-ticket expenditures — or inheritances. In contrast, most transfers are small, with the median total transfer lying between $1,900 and $3,000.

Financial Transfers by Counterparty

Table 3 drills down on the identities of the counterparties: among those giving transfers, to whom were the transfers given; and among those receiving transfers, from whom had the transfers been received. We combine all transfers except bills.

As might be expected, the most common type of transfer is from older households to younger: About 13 percent and 6 percent of respondents made transfers to their adult children or grandchildren, respectively, while 11 percent and 3 percent of respondents received transfers from their parents or grandparents. On the other hand, transfers in the opposite direction are less common: About 8 percent report giving transfers to their parents, and 2 percent report receiving transfers from adult children.

Financial Transfers by Demographic

Table 4 compares transfers across age and income groups.

As might be expected, respondents aged 18-34 are the least likely to give transfers. Less expected is the finding that the youngest respondents make the largest gifts ($77,400) on average. The data reveal that this outcome reflects a small number of extremely large housing transfers. The median gift rises with age, with most young gift-givers providing less than $1,000 and older gift-givers providing $3,000 or more. Discovering why the distribution of reported gifts is so skewed among the young would seem to be a high priority. A similar pattern emerges when we look at income groups: The lowest income group is the least likely to make gifts but on average gives the most.

Turning to transfers received, Table 4 shows that young and low-income individuals are most likely to receive transfers, and the average transfers they receive are exceeded only by those received by, respectively, the highest age and income groups. This is arguably less puzzling than the observed pattern of gift-giving, as young and/or lower-income individuals often have the highest needs.

In-Kind Transfers

The transfer module also records in-kind transfers of uncompensated services — most notably caregiving for children or adults — which are shown in Table 5.⁷ Transfers are measured in days per year or hours per month. For brevity, we will focus on days.

The table shows that individuals aged 55-65 (29 percent) are most likely to give in-kind transfers, while those aged 18-34 (15 percent) are most likely to receive them. Once again, we see that many more people report giving transfers than receiving them. One reason for this may be that older individuals with care needs are underrepresented. In any event, these transfers often involve major time commitments. Combining all counterparties, we see that providers on average spend 160 days a year providing these services, with half spending 50 days or more. Recipients report similar amounts.

Another interesting pattern involves time transfers across income groups. Although low-income, medium-income and high-income groups give and receive time transfers at similar rates, low-income groups gave and received more days of assistance both on average and at the median than those in the middle-income or high-income groups.

Table 6 presents the final type of transfer we consider: free lodging. About 10 percent of the population reports providing rent-free lodging, and 6 percent reports receiving it. As expected, the most common transaction is a parent providing free lodging to an adult child. The data likewise show that respondents aged 55-65 are most likely to provide lodging, while respondents aged 18-34 are most likely to receive it. Stays involving more distant relations and unrelated people are also common, although shorter, perhaps being driven by couch surfing.

Summary

The new UAS transfer module asks respondents about transfers of wealth, uncompensated services and lodging. These data are recent — collected in 2025 — and comprehensive. For the most part, the data patterns we found in our initial review seem sensible. The majority of transfers pass from parents and grandparents to children and grandchildren, although transfers in the opposite direction or between other parties are also common. The least frequent but largest transfers involve assistance with purchasing a house, while transfers that help with paying bills are the most frequent but smallest.

Several features of the transfer data deserve further investigation. The first is that far more respondents report giving transfers than receiving them. These numbers need not equal each other, but the difference is large. A second striking feature is that a small number of individuals report making or receiving very large transfers. These reports may be accurate, but they may also reflect misinterpretation and/or other measurement errors.

These concerns notwithstanding, perhaps the best way to improve the transfer module is to administer it again in the future. It is extremely valuable to see how transfers evolve over time and how they correlate with respondents' personal circumstances.

Economic theory stresses the value of applying a lifetime perspective to financial decisions. From this perspective, there is a big difference between a one-time $10,000 transfer and a $10,000 transfer repeated over multiple years. Additional waves of the transfer data would allow us to make such a distinction.

There is also a substantial body of work examining whether individuals use transfers to insure each other against volatile economic outcomes. Having multiple waves of data would help researchers determine whether transfers are more common when potential recipients are struggling and potential donors are thriving.⁸

John Bailey Jones is a vice president and economist, Jason Kosakow is survey director, and Lillian Zhu is a research associate, all in the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. We thank, without implicating, Marco Angrisani for helpful comments.

To cite this Economic Brief, please use the following format: Jones, John Bailey; Kosakow, Jason; and Zhu, Lillian. (June 2026) "How Much Financial Help Do People Give and Receive? Evidence from the Understanding America Survey." Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Brief, No. 26-19.

This article may be photocopied or reprinted in its entirety. Please credit the authors, source, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and include the italicized statement below.

Views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System.