Recent opinion polls show that more than a quarter of Russians say their financial position has deteriorated, while fewer than 10 % report an improvement. That balance between positive and negative assessments of household welfare has become firmly established over the past year. Rosstat said real incomes rose by 1.5 % in the first quarter of 2026. Bankers, however, say consumer spending is now clearly below the levels seen in the same periods last year.
Just 8 % of Russians said their financial position had improved over the past two to three months, according to the Public Opinion Foundation, or FOM. By contrast, 26 % said their situation had deteriorated over the same period, while about 65 % reported no significant change. The figures come from FOM’s weekly nationwide door-to-door survey, carried out in the second half of April among 1,500 respondents across 51 Russian regions. The pollsters put the margin of error at no more than 3.6 %.
Since March last year, a growing number of Russians have reported a deterioration in their financial position. In spring 2025, only 18 % of respondents said they were worse off. Today, the figure is more than a quarter. The share reporting an improvement has meanwhile fallen from 14 % to 8 %.
In November last year, one in four respondents said their financial position had deteriorated over the previous two to three months. The share reporting an improvement that autumn was the same as now, at 8 % of Russians (see NG dated November 19, 2025). By comparison, in summer 2024, positive and negative assessments of changes in financial position were almost evenly balanced. In mid-2024, 15 % of respondents said they were worse off, while 11 % reported an improvement.
Such surveys should be read as a gauge not only of actual changes in household finances, but also of respondents’ sentiment. Before the start of Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, sociologists recorded sharp swings in how Russians assessed their own financial position. In the relatively prosperous year of 2015, 46 % of respondents said they were worse off, while just 4 % reported an improvement.
VTsIOM (Russian Public Opinion Research Centre) data show that in April 2026 about a quarter of Russians were experiencing mainly negative emotions, with that group growing in size. Among those born between 1992 and 2000, anxiety and negative emotions were far more widespread, reaching 41 %.
‘This generation bears a heavy social burden: professional, family and economic. Anxiety is no longer a background feeling, but is becoming the dominant emotional state,’ VTsIOM sociologists said.
Weekly data on total consumer spending from SberIndex offer a picture less distorted by sentiment. Real consumer spending in the latest week was still 1.1 % below the level recorded a year earlier, according to its analysts. SberIndex tracks weekly fluctuations in non-cash consumer spending across different product categories. But the broader figures show that Russian consumer spending has remained below last year’s level for several weeks, even after adjustment for official inflation. The key outcome of the first quarter was a sharp slowdown in the growth of real disposable incomes, which fell by a factor of five compared with the same period last year, despite lower inflation (see NG dated April 30, 2026). The Central Bank had presented its fight against inflation as a way to support growth in real incomes: prices, it argued, should not ‘eat up’ wages and pensions.
Growth in nominal consumer spending, measured against the same week a year earlier, has been slowing rapidly since spring 2025. Source: SberIndex.
In practice, however, Russians are feeling the effects of worsening finances at the companies that employ them. The share of loss-making companies in the country has risen by 15 % compared with the start of last year.
Worsening corporate finances in Russia are also pushing up wage arrears. Total unpaid wages stood at RUB 2.13 billion at the end of March 2026, up 6 % from February. Compared with January, overdue wage arrears in March were almost 15 % higher. Even so, the level of overdue wage debt remains well below danger levels and still amounts to no more than 1 % of companies’ monthly payroll.
In February 2026, the latest preliminary data showed average wage growth was virtually unchanged. Nominal wages were up 15 % from February last year. Adjusted for official inflation, annual wage growth remained at 8.6 %.
Real disposable incomes, calculated after mandatory payments and adjusted for consumer prices, rose by 1.5 % year on year in the first quarter of 2026, Rosstat said.
At a time when most experts expect stagnation, or even an economic downturn, every Rosstat release carries particular weight. It is Sergei Galkin’s agency that determines whether the macroeconomic data point to a positive or negative picture.
As NG has reported, household income growth slowed fivefold in the first quarter of 2026. Businesses, meanwhile, have been hit by a chain of payment delays that often starts with government clients.
ORIGINAL: NG/Russians Feel Worse Off Despite Rising Real Incomes
