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What percentage of American adults cut back on necessities like food or medicine to pay an energy bill in the last two months?
12.7% of American adults cut back on necessities like food or medicine to pay an energy bill in the last two months - about 13 in every 100, or 1 in 10. That is the figure published by the Household Pulse Survey for 2026.
0 in 100100 in 100
12.7
Where this number comes from
- Survey
- Household Pulse Survey
- What it measured
- HTOPS HPS 2607 (collected July 15 – August 3, 2026), item ENERGY (“In the LAST 2 MONTHS, did your household reduce or forego expenses for basic household necessities, such as medicine or food, in order to pay an energy bill?”), counting responses 1=Yes, as a share of adults who answered (8.7% did not). Computed from the Census Bureau's public-use microdata with the person weight PWEIGHT; the standard error uses its 80 successive-difference replicate weights (4/80 · Σ of squared deviations). The counts and standard errors behind it reproduce the published table housing1. Census labels these estimates experimental; unweighted n = 11,930.
- Population
- U.S. adults aged 18 and over
- Year
- 2026
- 95% confidence interval
- 10.39% to 15.01% (derived from the published standard error)
Work of the U.S. federal government - public domain. See the source data
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