Unbanked Population Statistics 2026: US and Global Data

Unbanked households made up 4.2% of all US households in 2023, about 5.6 million homes with no bank or credit union account, the lowest level since the FDIC survey began in 2009.

Two other official counts sit beside that one. The Federal Reserve reports that 6% of US adults were unbanked in 2025, and the World Bank counts 1.3 billion adults worldwide without a financial account. All three readings are correct, and none belong on one chart, because each survey counts a different population. Unbanked population statistics below cover the United States and the world, the demographic breakdowns behind them, and the rules that decide which figure answers which question.

Key Takeaways

• The US unbanked household rate fell from 8.2% in 2011 to 4.2% in 2023, a decline the FDIC associates largely with rising income and educational attainment.
• 21.8% of households with less than $15,000 in income were unbanked in 2023, down from 27.7% in 2013.
• 70.9% of unbanked households told the FDIC they were not very or not at all interested in having a bank account. Most US unbanked households say they do not want an account, which makes the residual gap a question of trust more than of access.
• 1.2% of unbanked households used crypto in 2023, against 5.0% of banked households.
• 79% of adults worldwide held an account in 2024, up from 51% in 2011.
• About 900 million adults without an account own a mobile phone, including 530 million with a smartphone.
• 14.2% of US households, about 19.0 million, were underbanked in 2023, more than three times the unbanked count.

Editor’s Choice

• US unbanked households: 5.6 million in 2023, a record low.
• US banked adults paying an overdraft fee: 12% in 2025.
• Global adults without an account: 1.3 billion.
• Cash-only unbanked households: 66.2% of all unbanked households.
• Widest state gap: 9.4% in Mississippi against 0.9% in Virginia and Vermont.
• Mobile money transaction value: over $2 trillion processed in 2025, a 23% increase compared to 2024.
• US households using crypto: 4.8% in 2023, of which 92.6% held it as an investment.

Banking Status of US Households

The figures here come from 10 primary sources: 8 regulatory or multilateral publications and 2 research and industry-association reports, published between November 2024 and May 2026. Only official survey releases and their underlying statistical tables qualified, and no aggregator or market-research estimates were used. Figures are updated when the issuing bodies publish new waves.

• 81.6% of US households, about 109.1 million, were fully banked in 2023, meaning they held an account and used no nonbank financial products or services.
• 14.2%, roughly 19.0 million households, were underbanked, holding an account while still turning to nonbank providers.
• 4.2%, about 5.6 million households, were unbanked.
• 95.8% of US households, about 128.0 million, were banked in 2023.
• The FDIC’s latest published wave was conducted in June 2023 and collected responses from almost 30,000 households.

Source: FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households 2023

A household that holds an account and still buys money orders is saying something specific about what that account fails to do for it.

US Unbanked Rate by Year, 2009 to 2023

• The unbanked rate was at its highest recorded level, 8.2%, in 2011.
• Between 2011 and 2023, it fell by almost half, corresponding to an additional 5.3 million banked households.
• The FDIC reported that about two-thirds of that decline was associated with changes in households’ socioeconomic circumstances, particularly increases in income and educational attainment.
• The most recent move was small, and the rate changed little between 2021 at 4.5% and 2023 at 4.2%, a difference that was not statistically significant.

Two-thirds of a decline being explained by rising income rather than by banking outreach is an uncomfortable finding for the financial-inclusion industry, and the FDIC states it plainly in its own executive summary.

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Recent Developments

• May 2026: The Federal Reserve published its 2025 household survey, reporting that 6% of adults were unbanked in 2025 and that the rate has held steady at that level since 2021.
• April 2026: The GSMA reported that mobile money services processed over $2 trillion in transactions during 2025, a 23% increase compared to 2024.
• July 2025: The World Bank released Global Findex 2025, finding that nearly 80% of adults worldwide now have a financial account, up from 50% in 2011.
• June 2025: The FDIC fielded its next household survey wave, whose questionnaire asks unbanked households how interested they are in having a bank account and whether past banking or credit history, missing identification, or minimum balances keep them from opening one. Results have not yet been published.
• 2025: Federal Reserve Board staff circulated a working paper proposing a new way to classify individuals without a bank account, accounting for their actual interest in being banked.

Which Survey Says What

• The FDIC measures households, and its National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households counts a household as unbanked when no one in the household had a checking or savings account at a bank or credit union, which put the rate at 4.2% in 2023.
• The Federal Reserve measures adults and counts a person as unbanked when neither they nor their spouse or partner had a checking, savings, or money market account.
• The World Bank measures adults holding an account at a bank or similar financial institution or through a mobile money provider, or both, a definition that captures people no US survey design would reach.
• The field dates sit more than two years apart, so part of any gap between the figures is calendar rather than method.

Source: FDIC 2023, Federal Reserve SHED 2025, World Bank Global Findex 2025

A household rate and an adult rate cannot land on the same number even in a flawless survey, because one banked adult banks the whole household under the FDIC’s design. Any page that plots both on a single line has built a trend out of a definition.

Unbanked Population Statistics by Household Income

• 21.8% of households with less than $15,000 in income were unbanked in 2023, the highest rate of any income band.
• That same group stood at 27.7% as recently as 2013, a meaningful drop over the decade.
• The Federal Reserve found the same shape among adults, where 1% of adults with income of $100,000 or more were unbanked.
• Households whose income varied a lot from month to month were unbanked at a higher rate than households whose income was about the same each month.

By the numbers: 21.8% of US households earning less than $15,000 were unbanked in 2023, down from 27.7% in 2013. Households without a high school diploma sat at 19.7%, barely moved from 19.2% in 2021. Income and education carry more of the variation than any regional split does.

Unbanked Rates by Race and Ethnicity

• The unbanked rate among American Indian or Alaska Native households increased between 2021 at 6.9% and 2023 at 12.2%, having decreased from 16.3% in 2019.
• 10.6% of Black households were unbanked in 2023, down from 13.8% in 2019, and 9.5% of Hispanic households were unbanked, down from 12.2%.
• Those rates remained several times higher than the unbanked rate among White households at 1.9%.
• Black households comprised 12.9% of households overall but 32.3% of the unbanked in 2023.
• The gap survives income controls, and among households earning between $50,000 and $75,000, 3.5% of Black households and 4.5% of Hispanic households were unbanked, compared with 0.8% of White households.

Unbanked Rates by Education, Disability, and Family Structure

• The unbanked rate among households without a high school diploma changed little between 2021 at 19.2% and 2023 at 19.7%.
• The rate among working-age households with a disability decreased sharply between 2019 at 16.2% and 2023 at 11.2%.
• Even after that improvement, the rate among working-age households with a disability remained three times as high as the rate among working-age households without one at 3.7%.
• Working-age households with a disability comprised 8.1% of households overall but made up 21.5% of the unbanked.
• Single-mother households had an unbanked rate of 13.4% in 2023, higher than the rate among single-father households at 7.8%, and single-parent households overall sat at 12.3% against 2.3% for married-couple households with children.

Source: FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households 2023

Why Unbanked Households Say They Have No Bank Account

• “Don’t have enough money to meet minimum balance requirements” was the most cited reason at 42.3%, and the most cited main reason at 23.3%.
• “Don’t trust banks” was the second-most cited main reason at 15.7%.
• One-third of unbanked households, 33.4%, cited a reason related to fees or a minimum balance as their main reason.
• Missing personal identification was cited more frequently among unbanked households that were very or somewhat interested in an account than among those that were not.
• Much higher proportions of unbanked households with no interest in an account cited not trusting banks or wanting more privacy.

The money reasons barely move between the two groups. Trust and privacy rise by roughly half again. That contrast is the most policy-relevant thing in the FDIC’s reason data, and it sets up the section below.

How Many Unbanked Households Want an Account

• Three in ten unbanked households, 29.1%, were very or somewhat interested in having a bank account, while 70.9% were not very or not at all interested.
• Applying that split to the national count, roughly 1.6 million US households are both unbanked and want in.
• Close to 4.0 million households make up the remainder, having stepped away rather than been shut out, on their own account of it.
• Federal Reserve Board staff have proposed formalizing that split, arguing for differentiating the individuals that do not have a bank account and would like to have one, the “unbanked”, from individuals that do not have a bank account and are not interested in having one, the “out of banking population”.
• Their stated rationale is that the groups differ in policy-relevant ways, since the unbanked mostly cite financial and past credit or banking history problems, while the out-of-banking population cites a growing mistrust toward the traditional banking system.

Worth noting: The proposal is analogous to how unemployment statistics are defined and estimated, and it comes from staff at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. On the FDIC’s own interest question, that framing puts most of the group outside the reach of access-focused policy.

Read that way, the United States does not have a single access problem. A smaller access problem sits underneath a far larger trust problem, and the two need completely different interventions.

Unbanked Rates by US Region

• The unbanked rate in the South in 2023 was 5.1%, the highest of the four census regions.
• The West was lowest at 3.4%, with the Midwest at 3.8% and the Northeast at 3.9%.
• The South’s own rate has improved, and it was similar to 2021 at 4.9%, having decreased from 6.2% in 2019.
• State-level spread is far wider than the regional spread, and rates ranged from 0.9% in Virginia and Vermont to 9.4% in Mississippi.

How Unbanked Households Move Money Without a Bank

• 66.2% of unbanked households relied entirely on cash, while 33.8% used a combination of prepaid cards or nonbank online payment services such as PayPal, Venmo, or Cash App. Those are the same consumer rails measured in the P2P payment statistics, where banked-user behavior looks nothing like this.
• 20.1% of unbanked households were using online payment services at the time of the survey, against 51.0% of banked households.
• Prepaid cards run the other way, and 21.6% of unbanked households used them against 5.2% of banked households.
• 28% of unbanked adults used a nonbank money order or check cashing service in 2025.
• The pattern is substitution rather than supplement, with 90.7% of unbanked households holding prepaid cards using them for at least one core transaction, against 46.0% of banked households.

Source: FDIC National Survey of Unbanked and Underbanked Households 2023

Crypto Use by Banking Status

• 4.8% of US households owned or used crypto or digital assets in the previous 12 months in 2023.
• Use ran lower among the unbanked, not higher, at 1.2% of unbanked households against 5.0% of banked households.
• Underbanked households were the heaviest users at 6.2%, which fits their wider habit of reaching for nonbank products while holding an account.
• Purpose matters more than the headline share, and 92.6% of crypto-using households held it as an investment while only 4.4% used digital assets as a form of payment.
• Income moves crypto use in the opposite direction from unbanked status, with 7.3% of households earning at least $75,000 using crypto against 1.1% of households with less than $15,000 in income. That income skew tracks what the crypto user demographics data has shown for years.

Key finding: Crypto use in 2023 was more common among underbanked households at 6.2% than among fully banked households at 4.8% and unbanked households at 1.2%. 92.6% of crypto-using households held it as an investment. The banking-the-unbanked case does not show up in US household data.

Adoption patterns elsewhere look different, which is the point worth holding onto when reading global crypto adoption rates by country against US household survey data.

Unbanked Adults in the Federal Reserve’s Survey

• 6% of adults were unbanked in 2025, and the rate has held steady at that level since 2021.
• The 2024 wave recorded a rate that had inched up from 5% in 2020.
• Unbanked rates were higher among younger adults, Black and Hispanic adults, and adults with a disability.
• 12% of adults with a bank account said they paid an overdraft fee in the prior 12 months, up 1 percentage point from 2021.
• Among banked adults, higher shares of low- and middle-income adults, Black and Hispanic adults, and adults under age 60 paid an overdraft fee in the prior 12 months.

Source: Federal Reserve Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking 2025

Global Account Ownership, 2011 to 2024

• 79% of adults worldwide have an account at a bank or similar financial institution or through a mobile money provider, or both, up from 51% in 2011.
• 75% of adults in low- and middle-income economies now have an account.
• A gender gap remains but has narrowed, with 77% of women holding accounts against 81% of men.
• Women’s account ownership in low- and middle-income countries nearly doubled, from 37% in 2011 to 73% in 2024.
• Saving followed access, and 40% of adults in low- and middle-income economies saved using an account in 2024, an increase of 16 percentage points on 2021.

Account Ownership by Economy and Region

• India reached 90% account ownership among both men and women. That account base is what makes the country’s UPI transaction data possible at the volumes it now runs.
• In East Asia and Pacific, 86% of adults hold a smartphone, and 83% hold a financial account.
• Account ownership in Sub-Saharan Africa grew to 58% of adults, up from 49% in 2021.
• Account ownership in the Middle East and North Africa rose to 53% from 45% in 2021, and 17% of adults save formally, up from 11% in 2021.
• About 70% of adults in Latin America and the Caribbean have an account, and nearly 80% of adults in South Asia own one.

The same sequence keeps repeating: a national instant-payment rail lands, account ownership follows within a few years, and the unbanked count drops faster than any outreach program managed. The central bank digital currency programs now in pilot are the next test of whether that pattern generalizes.

Phones Reach the Unbanked Faster Than Accounts Do

• 86% of adults globally own a mobile phone, including 68% of adults with a smartphone.
• Among those without an account, about 900 million adults have a mobile phone, including 530 million with smartphones.
• The World Bank frames that as a distribution problem rather than a hardware problem, noting that many of these individuals have the foundations needed to get a digitally enabled account, such as mobile phones, personal ID, and SIM cards registered in their names.
• Mobile money is already the vehicle where it exists, with 40% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa holding a mobile money account in 2024, up from 27% in 2021.
• Latin America and the Caribbean reached 37% mobile money account ownership, up from 22% in 2021. Europe’s digital banks take a different route to a similar endpoint, as the Revolut user statistics show.

What percent of the US population is unbanked?

Two official answers exist, and they measure different things. The FDIC reported that 4.2% of US households, about 5.6 million, were unbanked in 2023, counting a household as unbanked when nobody in it holds a bank or credit union account. The Federal Reserve reported that 6% of adults were unbanked in 2025, counting a person as unbanked when neither they nor their spouse or partner holds a checking, savings, or money market account.

The household figure is lower by construction, because one banked adult banks the whole household under the FDIC’s design. Quote the household rate when the question is about homes and the adult rate when it is about people, and name the survey either way.

Which country has the most unbanked population?

The Global Findex reports account ownership by economy rather than a league table of absolute unbanked counts, so the honest answer names a group rather than a country. India reached 90% account ownership among both men and women, which means even the world’s most populous country now banks the large majority of its adults.

What the World Bank does quantify is where the remaining opportunity sits. Of the 1.3 billion adults who still lack access to financial services, about 900 million already have a mobile phone. Country-level unbanked counts track population size as much as exclusion, which is why rates rather than totals are the comparable measure.

Conclusion

The unbanked count keeps falling and keeps getting harder to move. US household exclusion sits at 4.2%, roughly 5.6 million homes, down from 8.2% in 2011, yet the Federal Reserve’s adult measure has not shifted since 2021, and 70.9% of unbanked households say they are not very or not at all interested in an account. Globally, 79% of adults now hold an account, while 1.3 billion do not and about 900 million of those already own a mobile phone.

The remaining gap is really three markets. Low-income households priced out by minimum balances, working-age adults with a disability, and households that have decided banks are not for them each need a different product. The next US household wave is already collected and awaiting publication, and it is the first that can show whether trust or cost is now the binding constraint.