In the Fed’s 2025 public data file, 63.1% of adults would have covered a $400 emergency with cash or its equivalent, and with no other method. Another 12.2% said they could not pay the expense. Another 15.3% said they would put it on a credit card and pay it off over time. The file has 12,934 adults. The shares use the survey weight.
These three figures are our calculation from the public CSV. They are not a sentence copied from the Fed’s written report, which can define the cash group differently. The 63.1% counts only people who named cash or a cash equivalent and did not also name another way. The 12.2% and the 15.3% are separate questions. They overlap with each other, and they are not slices of the remaining 36.9%, so they do not add to 100%.
There is no state figure on this page. The state sample in the public file is too thin to quote. A national share is not a claim about any one state.
Source
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, 2025 public use file (public2025.csv). U.S. government work. See the SHED page. Our three shares are available under CC BY 4.0. Credit “My Credit Guide (mycreditguide.org)”.
Steven Reynolds, “Who Could Cover a $400 Emergency with Cash,” My Credit Guide, October 8, 2026, https://mycreditguide.org/data/emergency-expense-400/.
If the $400 would go on a card, the payoff calculator and the minimum-payment calculator show what carrying it costs.