The Poor Status of Adult Financial Education

Five major datasets measuring adult and youth financial capability have landed in the last three years. Read separately, each tells a troubling story. Read together, they describe a structural crisis in how the world prepares human beings to navigate money — one that no app, no robo-advisor, and no government transfer can fully compensate for.

In December 2024, the OECD published the results of PIAAC Cycle 2 — the most comprehensive international assessment of adult cognitive skills ever conducted. The Survey of Adult Skills measured literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving in 31 countries, covering roughly 160,000 adults aged 16 to 65. The numeracy results deserve careful attention, because numeracy is not an abstract academic metric. It is the subfloor beneath all financial decision-making — and as I've written separately, poor math skills are the hidden enemy of financial education.

The OECD average numeracy score stands at 263 out of 500. That number sits at the lower edge of Level 2 proficiency — the threshold at which adults can handle multi-step mathematical problems and interpret information that isn't immediately obvious. Below that threshold, roughly one in four adults across participating countries, lives a population that cannot reliably compute a percentage, interpret a simple interest statement, or read a table of investment returns.

The headline finding is stark: only 8 of the 31 participating countries showed improvement in numeracy since the first PIAAC cycle. The rest stagnated or declined. Over the same period, average literacy fell in the majority of countries too — the OECD noting that only Denmark and Finland improved on that front. These are not marginal rounding errors. They represent millions of adults entering or remaining in labour markets with cognitive tools insufficient for the economy they inhabit.

Who leads — and why it matters for adult financial education

Finland, Japan, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands lead the rankings. Norway's score of 285 — 22 points above the OECD average — places it firmly among the world's elite. These countries share structural features worth noting: high participation in adult education and training, strong parental education levels, and crucially, workplace environments that keep mathematical skills alive long after formal schooling ends. Skills that aren't used, erode. This is the Matthew Effect applied to cognition.

The United States result deserves its own paragraph. American adults lost approximately 7 numeracy points between 2017 and 2023, while literacy fell by 12 points. The decline is not evenly distributed — it is concentrated among those already at the bottom of the distribution. Top scorers remain roughly stable. Those at Level 1 or below are falling further behind. The gap between the most and least skilled adults in the United States is actively widening. This is exactly the dynamic that compounds into lifetime wealth inequality.

If PIAAC measures the mathematical foundation, the OECD/INFE International Survey of Adult Financial Literacy measures what people build on top of it. The 2023 edition — the third coordinated measurement exercise, following surveys in 2015/16 and 2019/20 — covered 39 countries and 68,826 adults aged 18 to 79 using a standardised toolkit assessing financial knowledge, financial behaviour, and financial attitudes.

The headline is not encouraging. Across all participating countries, only 34% of adults reach the minimum target score for financial literacy — defined as scoring at least 70 out of 100 on the combined knowledge, behaviour, and attitude framework. Among OECD countries specifically, that rises to 39%. Put differently: on the most recent global reading, roughly six in ten adults fall short of the baseline considered necessary to make sound financial decisions.

Three things stand out when you cross-reference INFE with PIAAC. First, the countries that score well on numeracy (PIAAC) tend to score better on financial literacy (INFE) — but the correlation is imperfect. Norway performs strongly on both. Italy performs poorly on both. High numeracy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial literacy. The knowledge, behaviour, and attitude components of financial literacy require dedicated adult financial education, not just mathematical competence.

Second, the 2023 INFE survey introduces a digital financial literacy component for the first time — reflecting the explosion of digital financial products since 2015. The findings suggest that digital financial literacy lags even basic financial literacy in most countries, creating new vectors of vulnerability precisely where adoption is fastest.

Third, financial well-being — the ultimate output variable — is only weakly correlated with financial knowledge in many countries. Behaviour and attitude matter as much as knowledge. This is the SYA hypothesis in data form: mechanics and mindset are both necessary. Knowing what compound interest is and actually exploiting it systematically are two entirely different achievements.

PIAAC describes what adults know today. PISA describes what the next generation of adults will know tomorrow. The 2022 PISA results, released in December 2023, paint a picture that should alarm anyone who believes the problem will self-correct through generational turnover.

Between 2018 and 2022, mean mathematics performance across OECD countries fell by a record 15 points — the largest single-cycle decline since PISA began. Reading fell 10 points, twice the previous record. The OECD attributed part of the decline to COVID-19 school disruptions, but Director of Education Andreas Schleicher explicitly warned against over-attributing the results to the pandemic: declines in mathematics and reading were already underway before 2018, with trends falling for a decade in some countries.

Financial literacy at 15 — the PISA optional module

PISA 2022 also included a financial literacy module, now in its fourth edition, covering 20 countries and approximately 100,000 students. The findings have direct implications for the adult skills picture we see in PIAAC and INFE, because today's 15-year-olds are tomorrow's adults making mortgage, pension, and investment decisions. For a deeper look at what schools can and should do, see my page on financial education in school.

Across the 14 OECD countries assessed, 18% of 15-year-olds lack basic proficiency in financial literacy — unable to apply financial knowledge to real-life situations. At the other end, only 11% are high performers (Level 5). The socioeconomic gradient is extreme: advantaged students outperform disadvantaged students by 87 points on average — more than one full proficiency level. In other words, where you are born financially determines, to a substantial degree, how financially literate you will become.

Norway participated in the PISA 2022 financial literacy assessment for the first time and, consistent with its PIAAC numeracy performance, placed above the OECD average. But the country-level narrative is less important than a structural finding: financial literacy in 15-year-olds is strongly predicted by performance in mathematics and reading, explaining about 80% of variance on average across OECD countries. The remaining 20% — the specifically financial — requires dedicated instruction that most school systems still don't provide consistently.

One powerful finding: high performers in financial literacy are 72% more likely to save money and 50% more likely to compare prices before buying. Financial knowledge translates into financial behaviour, at least at age 15. Whether that behaviour survives into adulthood — where it would show up in INFE data — depends on everything that happens next: the family environment, the financial marketplace encountered, the employer, the peer group. PIAAC tells us that for many adults, the behaviour doesn't survive. The degradation happens somewhere in the transition. This is one of the central puzzles of adult financial education: why does what we learn at 15 so often fail to stick at 45?

The United States warrants a focused paragraph because its PIAAC 2023 results are both dramatic and instructive. Literacy scores fell 12 points between 2017 and 2023. Numeracy fell 7 points. Both declines are statistically significant. The U.S. now scores below the OECD average in both domains — a country that simultaneously has some of the highest educational attainment rates in the OECD (by credential count) and some of the most rapidly declining adult skill levels. The P-Fin Index provides a complementary US-focused picture: see my analysis of financial literacy in America.

The paradox resolves when you understand the distribution. American adult education, like American income, is extremely unequal. The top performers — adults with graduate degrees, working in professional environments where skills are used daily — are holding steady. The bottom quarter is falling rapidly. The NCES notes that response rates were relatively low in 2023, which introduces some caution, but the directional finding is consistent with other evidence: U.S. adult literacy as measured by the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, media consumption studies, and workforce competency surveys has been deteriorating for years.

The 8-point gender gap in U.S. numeracy — favouring men — mirrors the global pattern seen in both PIAAC and INFE. This gap has direct economic consequences: the gender wealth gap, the pension gap, the investment participation gap, all have a cognitive-skills component that sits upstream of access and awareness. Closing the financial gender gap requires closing the numeracy gender gap first, or at least simultaneously.

The World Bank's Global Findex Database offers the fourth coordinate. Updated most recently in 2025 (based on 2024 data from 141 economies), it tracks account ownership, digital payment adoption, saving, and borrowing across the globe. The headline number from Findex 2021 was cause for celebration: account ownership reached 76% of the global adult population — up from 51% in 2011, a 50% increase in a decade. The 2025 edition reports further progress, with 79% of adults now holding an account.

Yet 1.4 billion adults remained unbanked as of 2021. And Findex data reveal a critical distinction that financial educators understand well: having an account is not the same as using financial services effectively. Hundreds of millions of banked adults continue to make all merchant payments in cash. About 620 million account holders pay utility bills in cash. The account exists; the financial behaviour has not followed.

Sub-Saharan Africa tells the most instructive story. Mobile money — led by M-Pesa in Kenya and its successors across the continent — has driven account ownership to 55% across the region, with 33% of adults holding mobile money accounts specifically. In 11 African economies, mobile money account ownership exceeds bank account ownership. This is access innovation at scale. But access without adult financial education creates its own risks: digital financial fraud, over-indebtedness through mobile credit, and the misuse of payment systems by those who lack the skills to evaluate them.

The Findex-PIAAC intersection is stark: the populations with lowest account ownership (developing economies, women, young adults, those outside the workforce) overlap almost perfectly with the populations scoring lowest on numeracy in PIAAC, and lowest on financial literacy in INFE. Financial inclusion and adult financial education are not sequential — the account does not automatically teach the skills needed to use it well. They must be designed together.

When you lay these five datasets side by side — PIAAC 2023, OECD/INFE 2023, PISA 2022, U.S. adult literacy data, and Global Findex — a coherent and uncomfortable architecture emerges. It has four levels.

The access layer is improving — Findex data confirm a genuine decade of progress. But the three layers above it — the foundation, the pipeline, and the superstructure — are either stagnant or deteriorating. We are building financial access on top of declining numeracy, shrinking adult financial education outcomes, and a school pipeline that is outputting less mathematically competent young people than it did a decade ago.

This is not a problem that resolves through market forces. The financial services industry has strong incentives to make products accessible regardless of whether users can evaluate them. Fintechs optimise for onboarding, not for financial capability. Governments invest in access (payment systems, account mandates, regulatory reform) far more than in adult financial education. The result is predictable: account ownership rises; bad financial decisions proliferate inside those accounts.

The global adult financial education landscape in 2026 is characterised by an accelerating paradox: the infrastructure of financial access has never been more developed, and the cognitive and attitudinal foundation required to use it well has never been more fragile. We have more accounts, more apps, more products, and more regulations designed to protect consumers — layered on top of a population whose numeracy is declining, whose financial literacy is stagnant, and whose youngest cohort is leaving school with weaker mathematical skills than their predecessors.

This is not a crisis that resolves through financial innovation. It resolves through the unglamorous, long-horizon work of adult financial education, curriculum reform, and the patient construction of financial habits — at home, in schools, and in workplaces. The countries that understand this — Finland, Norway, Japan — are also the countries where adults score highest on every measure that matters.

The evidence is in. The question now is whether the institutional will to act on it can be assembled before the gap widens further. For individual practitioners, educators, and investors in human capital, the direction is clear: go upstream. The foundation is cracking. That is where the leverage is.