Income Volatility and Insecurity: What Smart Data Tells Us About Britain’s Hidden Struggles

Across Britain, millions of people appear financially stable on paper - employed, earning, surviving. But zoom in closer, and a different reality emerges: wages that fluctuate week to week, unpredictable shifts, and growing reliance on overdrafts or credit to get through the week.

This is the story of income volatility and insecurity - a growing, often invisible economic pressure affecting households across the country. And thanks to smart data, we’re now seeing it with greater clarity than ever before.

Seeing the Invisible: How Smart Data Sheds Light on Financial Instability

In partnership with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Smart Data Foundry has developed an Income Volatility Dashboard that provides a groundbreaking look into the lived experience of financial instability in Britain and how it differs over time, place and across age groups and genders. 

Most people in Britain are paid their salary or pension monthly, along with benefits like Universal Credit (some benefits are still paid weekly or fortnightly), but a significant minority (around 15%, according to a 2023 survey) are paid their salary weekly. Those being paid weekly are more likely to be in jobs with variable hours and be paid lower salaries; and this does not account for those working in the gig economy whose income is less regular and much less predictable.

Unlike traditional datasets that measure average monthly incomes or static employment status, these income volatility datasets use anonymised, transaction-level financial data to reveal the near real-time fluctuations that define many people's financial lives, helping us to understand the impact of income volatility and add nuance to official statistics. 

Digging into Income Volatility data 

The Income Volatility Dashboard aggregates de-identified micro-level data from 1.3 milion GB consumer bank accounts into measurable indicators:

• Average weekly income
• Average weekly income classed as salary
• Average weekly total expenditure
• Average discretionary expenditure
• % in receipt of benefits
• % without salaried income

These indictors can be explored by postal area, by low/medium/high income variability as well as over time and can be further broken down by:

• Income source
• Income variability
• Payment interval

These breakdowns can be seen through the lens of location or sex and age group. 

In addition to the dashboard, Smart Data Foundry (as SDR UK’s Financial Data Service) also makes micro-level income volatility data and aggregated data collections available to researchers. The aggregated data collections are themed on how often people are paid, the source of their income and income variability. 

Access to these datasets and the dashboard can be requested via MyFoundry, our secure data platform. 

This kind of smart data - securely gathered and ethically managed - offers researchers and policymakers the opportunity to understand, anticipate, and respond to financial pressure points more effectively.

Key Insights from the Income Volatility Dashboard

Here’s what the data is telling us:

• Income variability can make it difficult to plan from week to week, with those experiencing high levels of variability seeing their payments vary by up to £526 between weeks, and those at the lower end still seeing payments vary by £391.
• Overall, around 10% of people are in receipt of benefits for some or all of their income. This rises to 14% amongst women, and drops to 7% of men. 
• Financial instability is not evenly distributed - certain regions show higher volatility,
  particularly where gig and zero-hour contracts are more likely to dominate local
  employment markets.

To learn more about insights found by researchers from Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Resolution Foundation and University of Edinburgh, read up on our recent webinar. 

Why This Matters for Policymakers

Income volatility isn’t just an economic issue - it’s a policy challenge with ripple effects across health, housing, education, and employment. It:

• Worsens mental health outcomes, as financial unpredictability can fuel anxiety and depression.
• Increases strain on public services, from housing support to emergency assistance.
• Undermines long-term stability, making it harder for people to plan, save, and build a safety net. 

Current welfare policies and labour market strategies often assume income is steady and predictable. Smart data, like the income volatility datasets, tells us that for some of the most vulnerable, that’s no longer the case - and policy needs to catch up.

Conclusion: Smarter Data for a Fairer Future

The work of Smart Data Foundry and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation demonstrates the power of smart data to uncover hidden struggles. But insight alone isn't enough. This data gives us the chance to do more than react - it allows us to design policy that prevents instability before it takes hold.

Backed by research, policy makers and those on the front line can use smart data to flag at-risk groups in near real-time, helping local authorities and NGOs to act before crises escalate.

For policymakers at every level - local, regional, national - this is an invitation: let’s start using the right data to ask better questions, build smarter systems, and support those whose lives are defined not by poverty alone, but by precarity.

Explore the dashboard and learn more in MyFoundry.