How does the SCF turn interviews into estimates?
The Short Answer
The 2025 SCF completed 4,367 family interviews. The public file covers 4,360 families, with five completed versions for each family to handle missing answers. Survey weights help turn the sample into national estimates.
Five versions of a family do not mean five different families.
Frequently asked questions
Why does one family appear five times in the public file?
The SCF uses five completed versions, called implicates, to handle missing answers and preserve information about uncertainty.
How many families are in the 2025 public data?
The public file covers 4,360 families, represented by 21,800 records. The completed interview count was 4,367 before public-file disclosure protection.
Can I take a simple average of all the rows?
That is not a substitute for the required survey analysis. Follow the Federal Reserve’s instructions for weights, all five implicates, and variance estimation.
The Long Answer · Go deeper
The 2025 SCF completed 4,367 family interviews. The public file contains 4,360 families after disclosure protection, represented by 21,800 records. The five records per family are implicates: alternative completed versions used to account for missing answers. They are not five independent respondents, and their differences help represent uncertainty about missing information.
Valid analysis must use the survey weights and the recommended procedures for combining implicates and estimating sampling uncertainty. Treating every row as an independent, equally weighted family can distort totals, averages, and standard errors. The small download on this site transcribes selected published aggregates; it does not perform a new microdata analysis or supply confidence intervals.
Read the Federal Reserve source ↗ · Independent Consumer Magazine explanation