Money Statistics: February 2024

Here is an overview of The Money Charity’s latest statistics for February 2024

Personal debt in the UK

• People in the UK owed £1,836.4 billion at the end of December 2023.
• The average total debt per household, including mortgages, was £65,395 and per adult was £34,526, around 99.9% of average earnings.
• Net mortgage lending decreased by £1.3 billion in the month, while net consumer credit lending increased by £117 million.
• Citizens Advice Bureaux across England and Wales answered 269,960 enquiries in January 2024, 12% up from January 2023

Mortgages, Rent and Housing

• Outstanding mortgage lending stood at £1,617 billion at the end of December 2023.
• The average mortgage interest rate was 3.37% at the end of December 2023. Based on this, households with mortgages would pay an average of £5,060 in mortgage interest over the year.
• HM Land Registry reports that the average house price for first-time buyers in Great Britain was £237,655 in December 2023, an annual decrease of -1.4% and a monthly change of 0.7%.
• According to the Office for National Statistics, private rental prices in the UK rose by 6.2% in the 12 months to January 2024.

Spending and Loans

• On average, 39.6 cash machine transactions (including balance enquiries and rejected transactions) were made every second in January 2024, a decrease of 7.8% in January 2023.
• The number of ATMs (in-branch and remote) fell from 50,300 at the end of 2022 to 47,711 at the end of 2023 (a fall of 5.2%).
• In Q3 2023, households in the UK spent £97.6 million a day on water, electricity and gas, or £3.48 per household per day.
• UK Finance figures show that 49.5% of credit card balances were bearing interest in November 2023.

Financial Inclusion

• According to the FCA, in the UK in 2022 there were 1.1 million adults who did not have a bank account. This was 2.1% of the UK adult population.
• According to the FCA Financial Lives Survey, in May 2022, 3.1 million people said they had paid for everything or most things using cash in the last 12 months.
• According to Ofcom, 1.5 million households did not have access to the Internet in March 2021. This included 18% of households with members aged 65+.
  Fair By Design has estimated that the cost of the poverty premium to a typical parliamentary constituency is £4.5 million a year. This equates to over £430 per year for a low-income household.

The full report can be found here.