In France, the household savings ratio is now higher than it was before the health crisis. It has been rising again since Q4 2023, reaching 18.5% in Q4 2024. On average in 2024, it was 1.2 percentage points higher than in 2023. As part of an institutional partnership, INSEE has access to anonymised data on the bank accounts of a sample of 180,000 households representative of La Banque Postale’s customer base. Although this data is not entirely representative of the French population, it sheds some light on changes in saving behaviour since 2020 and, in particular, identifies those households that saved more in 2024 than in 2023.

In aggregate terms, the trends in income, consumption and the savings ratio derived from this bank account data are consistent with national accounting data. They show that, since Q4 2023, household disposable income has been on an upward trend, consumer spending has slowed and the household savings ratio has been rising year-on-year.

Using this banking data, a breakdown by age category and income quintile shows that the average savings ratio increased in almost all categories between 2023 and 2024, except for a few of the youngest and least well-off categories. However, regardless of income level, the biggest rise in the savings ratio in 2023 and 2024 was among the oldest age categories. In the sample of banking data used in this study, people aged 65 or over accounted for around two thirds of the increase in the savings ratio between 2023 and 2024.

This increase in savings in 2024 among older people is due to the sharp rise in their income, particularly for those who are least well-off, driven by pension increases that belatedly reflected the inflation that occurred in 2023. At the same time, consumption by pensioners remained unchanged, resulting in a sharp rise in their savings, particularly among the least well-off...