More than two in five U.S. adults — 43 percent — believe that keeping financial secrets from a romantic partner is at least as damaging as physical infidelity, according to a January 2026 Bankrate survey conducted with YouGov among 2,564 U.S. adults, including 1,208 married or cohabiting couples. Cheating tends to dominate the cultural conversation about betrayal in relationships. This data suggests a quieter, slower-moving version of betrayal is doing nearly as much damage, and it’s happening inside a huge share of ordinary households.
Nearly Half of Couples Are Not Fully Transparent
Bankrate’s survey found that 45 percent of couples don’t share complete financial information with each other, against 55 percent who report full transparency. That’s a near-even split, which means financial secrecy of some kind — a hidden account, an unshared credit score, an undisclosed purchase — is closer to common than rare inside committed relationships. It isn’t a fringe behavior confined to couples already in trouble.
Which Secrets Are the Hardest to Forgive
Not all financial secrets carry the same weight. The Bankrate/YouGov data breaks the least forgivable ones down clearly: 25 percent of respondents pointed to a partner secretly carrying minor debt, unshared expenses, or hidden income as especially damaging, while 9 percent said the same about major undisclosed debt or income. Another 11 percent flagged simply not discussing credit scores or investment details as a serious breach. The pattern that emerges isn’t really about dollar amounts — a smaller, ongoing secret can sting as much as a larger one-time omission, because the smaller secret usually implies a habit of concealment rather than a single lapse.
Why Bankrate’s Own Analyst Says the Damage Compounds
Ted Rossman, Bankrate’s principal analyst, addressed why financial secrecy escalates the way it does: “Money can be a major source of conflict in relationships. This shows how personal our financial issues can be,” he said, adding that “secrets can take on a life of their own, undermining trust and the relationship. The fix is communication.” That compounding effect is the throughline in the data — a single hidden purchase rarely ends a relationship on its own, but the pattern of hiding it, and the moment a partner discovers there’s a pattern, is what does the real damage.
A Related, Older Number Tells the Same Story
This isn’t a one-survey phenomenon. Earlier Bankrate-affiliated research from CreditCards.com found that roughly 32 percent of coupled U.S. adults have committed some form of financial infidelity against a partner — hiding a purchase, a bill, a debt, or an account. Financial advisory firms that work with couples day to day describe the same pattern from the inside. Modern Wealth Management, a financial planning firm, has written about how financial infidelity erodes trust gradually rather than all at once, noting that the secrecy itself, more than the underlying financial decision, is usually what a partner reacts to most strongly once it surfaces.
Why Small Secrets Outnumber Big Ones
It’s worth pausing on why minor, ongoing secrecy showed up as more common — and nearly as damaging — than concealing something large. Hiding a $40 purchase or a small balance rarely feels like a betrayal in the moment it happens; it feels like avoiding an argument, or postponing an explanation until a “better time” that often never arrives. The trouble is that these small omissions rarely stay isolated. Bankrate’s data on the 45 percent of couples without full transparency suggests that partial disclosure tends to become a couple’s default mode rather than a one-time exception, which is exactly the pattern that turns a manageable secret into the kind of standing distrust that’s hard to walk back.
The Fix Is Less Complicated Than the Problem
What’s notable across all of this research is how consistently “communication” shows up as the counterweight to secrecy, not stricter budgeting rules or joint-account mandates. Full financial transparency doesn’t require identical spending habits or a shared philosophy about money down to the dollar. It requires both people knowing the real numbers and trusting that neither is quietly managing a version of the truth. Given how close that 43 percent figure sits to how people rate an actual affair, treating a hidden account or an unshared balance as a minor omission is a riskier bet than it might feel like in the moment.
