How Many Americans Really Live Paycheck to Paycheck?
Centrist pundits take issue with Bernie Sanders’s frequent claim that 60% of Americans are living “paycheck to paycheck.” His critics’ attempts to debunk this statistic aren’t convincing.
Bernie Sanders on Capitol Hill on March 14, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
Bernie Sanders is a big fan of citing troubling economic statistics. One of the figures that he features in his rotation is that 60 percent of Americans live “paycheck to paycheck.” This number consistently irritates certain wonks and so I’ve decided to do a deep dive into the controversy to see what I can make of it. In short, I’ve found that the phrase “paycheck to paycheck” is not consistently defined and that efforts to debunk the claim rely upon data that don’t convincingly do so.
Paycheck-to-Paycheck Surveys
LendingClub (60%)
The figure Sanders cites appears to come from the Paycheck-to-Paycheck Report, which was a series of monthly reports put out by LendingClub between June 2021 and December 2023. The methods of this report are opaque. LendingClub claims to have surveyed around 2,500 to 3,000 consumers for each report, but the reports do not make clear whether they are simply asking people if they live paycheck to paycheck or deducing this in some way using personal financial information. Nonetheless, the LendingClub report found that 52 percent to 64 percent of consumers lived paycheck to paycheck during the months they surveyed.
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