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Half of adult children still living at home

Cherry Reynard
Written By:
Cherry Reynard
Posted:
Updated:
04/07/2017

More than half of adult children (55%) are still living at home, even though three quarters of those aged 18-34 are in paid employment.

The majority are contributing to household bills, with a third contributing to the family pot based on earnings. Nevertheless, parents still said that adult children living at home costs them an average of £260 a month.

The OneFamily Intergenerational Lending report which surveyed over 2,000 parents and grandparents across the UK, found just 10% of parents expected to split the costs equally with them, with others reducing the costs to allow children to save.

The report found that this is having an impact on the way parents plan for the future, with many staying in the family home longer than expected. To date, downsizing has been a popular way to supplement retirement income. Half of all parents (47%) said they didn’t plan to have their children living with them for so long.

Georgina Smith, managing director of Lifetime Mortgages at OneFamily, said: “It’s natural that parents want to help their children make a good start in life. However financial pressures mean that parents are often paying towards their adult children’s lives much later into life.

“We’ve also seen an uplift in parents wanting to give their children help financially through a lump sum. Nearly three quarters (70%) of parents with children over 18 said they have helped them this way, with their main aim being to help them get on the property ladder when they eventually move out. This trend is reflected in sales of our lifetime mortgages with an increasing number of customers using this product to help their children and other relatives out financially.”

Recent data from the Equity Release Council showed the lifetime mortgage market displaying consistent growth: a record £1.24bn of housing wealth was unlocked via equity release in the second half of 2016. The volume of lifetime mortgage plans grew by 22% for 2016 as a whole.