Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS)

The NBS organizes a practical workshop between April 24 – 26, 2024 with a focus on the utilization of the HFCS data. The workshop is targeted at students, researchers, and analysts with a keen interest in exploring the economic and financial dynamics of household wealth, assets, and liabilities. See the attached invite for details. If you are interested in participating, please complete the application form.

The NBS provides researchers and academics with access to the anonymised HFCS database for statistical processing and non-commercial empirical research.

The questionnaire consists of two main parts:

1. Questions on the household as a whole: real assets and their financing, other liabilities, credit constraints, private business, financial assets, intergenerational transfers and gifts, consumption and savings.
2. Questions on individual household members: demographics (for all household members), employment, future pension entitlements and income (for household members aged 16 and over).

The data collected in each participating country are the so-called core variables. The set of non-core variables includes data for which countries are free to decide which of them to collect.

The Slovak questionnaire contains some additional questions that are not included in the common questionnaire template. These are, for example, questions on financial literacy or on a specific module on a selected topic (e.g. the impact of Covid). For further details, please contact hfcs@nbs.sk.

Working with the HFCS database is quite complex and requires adequate knowledge of data processing, statistics and econometrics, as well as survey methodology. A detailed description of the questionnaire and important aspects of the survey, such as the sampling design, weighting, data editing and techniques used for multiple imputation of missing responses, variance estimation using replication-based methods, data comparability issues, definitions and other details, can be found in the ECB‘s HFCS methodological report for the 2021 wave.

We provide HFCS data to interested parties for the sole purpose of non-commercial scientific research and analysis at the household level. If you require HFCS data at the level of individuals, please indicate this in the application along with the project proposal. Requests for these data will be considered separately. Please read the HFCS methodological report for the 2021 wave before applying for data.

You can request Slovak data using the form below:

Request for HFCS data

HFCS datasets for all participating countries can be requested using the European Central Bank form:

Access to the HFCS data