The 2025 TIAA-GFLEC Study Found That Americans Have Made Zero Financial Literacy Progress in 8 Years Quick Read – U.S. adults have stalled at 49% correct answers on the TIAA Institute GFLEC Personal Finance Index in 2025, matching 2017 results exactly, with significant gaps…
rsisting across gender (women 45% vs. men 53%), race (Black and Hispanic adults 38-39% vs. White and Asian adults 53-55%), and risk understanding declining to 36% from 39%. – Low financial literacy carries measurable costs: adults with very low literacy are 5x more likely to lack emergency savings, 3x more likely to be financially fragile, and spend 10 hours weekly worrying about finances compared to 4 hours for those with high literacy. – The analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks
Get them here FREE. Nine years of data have produced the same disappointing result. U.S. adults correctly answered just 49% of questions on the TIAA Institute GFLEC Personal Finance Index in 2025, matching the exact figure from 2017.
Across every annual administration of the survey, the average has never exceeded 52%. The share of adults who answered more than half the questions correctly was 48% in 2025, identical to the 2017 figure. In other words, after nearly a decade, financial literacy among American adults has made no measurable progress.