Spain | Saving in the country: looking beyond the headline numbers

Saving is often portrayed as an individual choice: spending less today in order to have more resources available tomorrow. But a household’s ability to save depends on much more than its willingness to set money aside. Income is crucial, but so are household composition, housing tenure and other circumstances that shape consumption and saving decisions.

In 2024, the median household saving rate was around 19%. Yet this figure conceals households facing very different economic circumstances and, consequently, very different opportunities to save. This is one of the main findings of Who Saves in Spain?, a BBVA Research working paper in which we analyse nearly 30,000 households using survey data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE). Our aim is to move beyond aggregate saving figures and understand why households differ in their ability to save.

Income, unsurprisingly, plays a central role. But the relationship between income and saving is not simply linear. Saving capacity generally rises with income, although the increase becomes smaller as income rises. In one of our estimates, a 1% increase in income is associated with a 0.63 percentage-point increase in the saving rate at lower income levels, compared with 0.51 percentage points at higher income levels. In other words, the relationship remains positive, but gradually flattens as income increases.

Income, however, does not tell the whole story. Household size is another important factor. Holding income and other characteristics constant, an additional household member is associated with a 12.5 percentage-point lower saving rate among households at the lower end of the saving distribution. At the upper end, the difference falls to just over four percentage points. Although sharing expenses can generate economies of scale, consumption needs also increase as household size grows, particularly among households with less room to save.

Housing tenure is another important source of variation. It remains significantly associated with saving capacity even when we compare households with similar income, size and employment status. Moreover, these differences are larger among households at the lower end of the saving distribution. Housing is simultaneously an expense, an asset and a long-term financial decision. We observe that households with similar incomes can display very different saving patterns depending on their housing situation.

Where households live also matters. Compared with those living in the most densely populated areas, households in medium- and low-density areas tend to have a greater capacity to save. Once again, these differences are larger at the lower end of the distribution. Housing and consumption costs, local labour-market conditions and other geographical characteristics may all contribute to this pattern, although our data do not allow us to determine which mechanism is most important.

Just as revealing are the factors that appear to matter less once household characteristics are considered. After accounting for income, housing tenure, household size and employment status, differences by age are relatively small and show no clear systematic pattern.

Nor do we find a consistently strong relationship between unemployment and saving capacity across the entire saving distribution once income is controlled for. This does not mean that unemployment is unimportant. Rather, it suggests that a substantial part of the association between unemployment and saving is captured by the income differences between households that are already accounted for in the model.

These results illustrate why aggregate figures, although useful, provide only part of the picture. Understanding household saving requires looking not only at how much income a household receives, but also at the circumstances that shape how that income is used. Income remains fundamental, but household composition, housing and where people live matter as well.

Averages, and even medians, are useful summary measures, but they can mask substantial differences across households. To understand how Spanish households actually save, we need to look beyond any single headline figure.

Press article. Published in Expansión on September 30, 2026.