Get the Gross Household Savings Rate for a variety of countries over time from the OECD’s Household Dashboard. The household savings rate is the share of household gross disposable income (adjusted for the net change in pension entitlements) that is saved rather than spent on final consumption.

It is a key input to consumption-smoothing and life-cycle/permanent-income theories of household behaviour, and a closely watched signal of both near-term consumption momentum (a falling savings rate can temporarily prop up spending even as income growth slows) and a household sector’s buffer against future income shocks. It complements Total Consumption (see get_total_consumption) - the two together show how much of household income is spent versus set aside.

The rate is seasonally adjusted and returned as a decimal fraction of adjusted gross disposable income (0.1177 for 11.77%). Because the denominator is adjusted for the net change in pension entitlements and the numerator is gross rather than net saving, this sits above the personal saving rate the BEA publishes for the United States.

See definition: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?df[ds]=dsDisseminateFinalDMZ&df[id]=DSD_HHDASH%40DF_HHDASH_INDIC

Also known as: household savings ratio, personal savings rate.

No programming experience? With the Finance Toolkit MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can calculate the Household Savings Rate for you. Just ask in plain English.

Calculate the Household Savings Rate in Python

The Household Savings Rate is available in the Economics module of the open-source Finance Toolkit. Install it with:

pip install financetoolkit -U

Then call get_household_savings_rate as shown below.

from financetoolkit import Economics

economics = Economics(start_date='2015-01-01', end_date='2022-12-31')

economics.get_household_savings_rate(
    countries=['United States', 'Germany'],
    quarterly=False)

Which returns:

  United States Germany
2018 0.1222 0.182
2019 0.1305 0.1793
2020 0.2063 0.2324
2021 0.1707 0.2199
2022 0.0981 0.189

Parameters

get_household_savings_rate accepts the following parameters:

  • countries (list[str] | str | None, optional): The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None.
  • quarterly (bool | None, optional): Whether to return the quarterly data or the annual data.
  • rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
  • trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None.
  • growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
  • lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
  • standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
  • rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.
House Prices Rent Prices Share Prices Exchange Rates Producer Price Index Real Effective Exchange Rate Household Debt to Income Ratio Misery Index Retail Sales Industrial Production Index Housing Starts Real Personal Income

The Economics module page introduces the module, and the sidebar lists all of its functions.

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