Fifty-eight percent of people in serious relationships now say they are financially dependent on their partner. A year earlier, that number was 40%. That 18-point jump comes from BMO’s 2026 Real Financial Progress Index, and while most of the attention on that survey went to the rising price of a first date, this is arguably the more consequential finding buried inside it. Something is changing in how couples actually cover their lives together, and it moved faster in twelve months than almost anyone tracking household money expected.
A Number That Moved Faster Than Expected
BMO’s index comes from an Ipsos survey of 2,501 U.S. adults, conducted between December 29, 2025 and January 27, 2026, with a credibility interval of ±2.4%. Buried a few questions past the headline-grabbing date-cost figures was a simple, direct ask: are you financially dependent on your partner? In 2025, 40% of people in serious relationships answered yes. A year later, 58% did. That is not a gradual drift — it is nearly a majority of committed couples describing a financial arrangement that, for most of them, did not exist the year before. Paul Dilda, BMO’s Head of U.S. Consumer Strategy, framed the underlying dynamic this way in the bank’s release: “While many couples disagree about money, our data suggest financial openness can defuse the drama, keeping your emotional connection strong and your budget healthy.”
The Independence Paradox
Here’s what makes the timing strange: this jump in dependency is happening alongside a countertrend toward financial separateness. A Bankrate survey of 2,564 U.S. adults conducted by YouGov in December 2025 found that 62% of American couples keep at least some of their money separate, and 26% keep it completely separate. Among Gen Z couples specifically, that number climbs to 51% maintaining fully separate finances. On the surface, you would expect a generation more committed to separate accounts to also be less financially entangled with a partner. Instead, BMO’s data shows dependency rising at the same time separateness is rising. It suggests that keeping distinct accounts and actually relying on someone else’s income are two different things entirely — you can maintain your own checking account and still not be able to cover rent without your partner’s paycheck.
What Couples Say Is Actually Driving It
Part of the answer sits in how unevenly couples try, and fail, to split costs in the first place. BMO found that 65% of people in serious relationships attempt to divide expenses evenly, yet the same survey shows early dating norms skewing hard in one direction: 71% of men expect to pay for a date entirely, while only 52% of women expect to split the bill. If those asymmetric habits carry into a live-in relationship or a shared lease, an “even split” quietly becomes impossible to sustain once one partner is earning less, working fewer hours, or covering an unplanned expense the other person doesn’t have. Dependency, in other words, may not be a decision couples make on purpose. It can be the accumulated effect of never quite getting to the conversation about who is actually paying for what.
The Piece That Actually Predicts Trouble
Dependency itself is not automatically a red flag; plenty of stable households run on one larger income for long stretches, especially around childcare or a career change. What the data suggests is riskier is dependency paired with financial secrecy. A companion Bankrate release from the same YouGov survey wave found that only 55% of partnered adults say they know everything about their partner’s finances — meaning 45% are missing real information about debt, income, or spending from the very person they may be financially relying on. Separately, BMO found that Americans rate financial responsibility (94%), sound financial planning (90%), and open money conversations (89%) among the most attractive traits a partner can have. Put plainly: people want transparency from a partner far more than they currently practice it, and that gap is exactly where a dependent relationship becomes a vulnerable one.
What This Means If It’s Your Relationship
If you recognized yourself in that 58%, you are not in the minority you might assume you are — you are, per BMO’s numbers, in the majority of committed couples surveyed. The useful move isn’t necessarily to chase full financial independence from your partner; for a lot of households right now, that isn’t realistic or even desirable. It’s closing the gap between how dependent you are and how much you actually know about the finances you’re depending on. That means asking about debt before it becomes a shared emergency, agreeing out loud on what “splitting costs” means in your specific relationship instead of assuming it, and treating a conversation about income and spending as routine maintenance rather than a crisis conversation you only have when something goes wrong. The couples showing up healthiest in this data aren’t the ones who avoided dependency altogether. They’re the ones who stopped treating money as something you don’t discuss until you have to.
