Living “paycheck to paycheck” is a phrase often used term to describe households that are under financial strain. But what does it really mean, and how many people find themselves depleting their paychecks shortly after earning them?

Bank of America Institute defines living paycheck to paycheck as a households “where necessity spending is more than 95% of their household income, leaving them relatively little left over for ‘nice to have’ discretionary spending or saving.” to be living paycheck to paycheck. 

“Many of these spending pressures are likely unavoidable, as they relate to family and housing costs,” Bank of America Institute senior economist David Tinsley told CBS MoneyWatch. 

In a Bank of America Institute survey of consumers in the third quarter of 2025, roughly half said they considered themselves to be living paycheck to paycheck.

Bank of America Institute also looked at its own customers’ spending patterns to determine that close to one-quarter of Americans actually live paycheck to paycheck, with most of their monthly income going straight toward essentials. 

“The share of households that are living paycheck to paycheck has been rising slightly over the last few years, which is not terribly surprising, because prices have risen for a lot of essential goods — groceries are more expensive, the cost of car insurance is up, and child care is up, too,” Tinsley said.

Higher income, higher housing costs

While lower-income households have a higher share of people who live paycheck to paycheck, some families that are higher up on the income ladder also fall into the same category. 

Around 35% of households with incomes below $50K a year are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 32% in 2019, according to internal Bank of America data. Meanwhile, about 20% of households earning $150,000 are living paycheck to paycheck, according to Bank of America Institute’s findings. That’s largely because they have high, fixed housing costs, according to Tinsley.

“People with higher incomes tend to have high-priced homes, and many will have large monthly mortgage payments. So it’s perfectly possible someone with a high income could have a lot of it swallowed up by essentials,” he said.

Hard cycle to break out of

It’s financially straining to live paycheck to paycheck. “It’s usually thought of as a bad thing, that adds stress and is detrimental to a person’s sense of financial well-being,” Tinsley said. 

It’s a hard cycle to break out of, too. Housing costs, which are often a household’s greatest expense, can be hard to minimize. 

“For most people, they can’t do much about where they live and how much they pay for their home, if they have kids at a school in a particular neighborhood,” Tinsley said. “A lot of these costs are sticky, and there isn’t much to do about it.”

In the longterm, such households end up with little in savings, and are exposed to financial shocks.

“If there were another inflation shock, or a sharper downturn to economy than expected and some people lose jobs, then people living paycheck to paycheck are most immediately pressured to make sharp reductions in spending to balance the books,” Tinsely said. “And that impacts the overall economy.”

Four large asteroids will make their closest approaches to Earth on Thursday, each passing by the planet within a 24-hour time frame. 

Two had already zipped past early in the morning, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But the remaining celestial objects on track to follow suit were set to make their appearances — albeit not literally, at least from the viewpoints of skywatchers on the ground — later on in the day. Although Thursday’s routes do mark the closest recorded Earth approaches to date for these asteroids, their paths are still quite far away, too distant for any human to spot one of them zooming through space overhead.

NASA scientists flag locations along these objects paths as close approaches when they are slated to arrive at points within 4.6 million miles from the Earth’s surface, which equates to roughly 19.5 times the distance between the moon and the planet, reads a description on the agency’s asteroid watch dashboard. The average distance from the surface of the planet to its satellite is 239,000 miles although the exact length varies at different points in the moon’s orbit.

When an asteroid is larger than about 150 meters, or about 490 feet, across and skims past Earth within this area deemed close range, scientists consider it a “potentially hazardous object.” That’s about the size of a building, and one of the asteroids passing Earth Thursday exceeds that size threshold. The asteroid, named 2002 NV16 after the year it was discovered, measures about 177 meters or 580 feet across — around the same height as a 50-story skyscraper. 

The skyscraper-sized rock will travel by the planet from a point 2.8 million miles away, NASA said. A diagram shows its orbit around Earth, the sun and several other planets nearer the sun in the Solar System. 

NASA tracks close approaches and calculates the odds of those space rocks — including asteroids, meteors and meteorites — impacting Earth. 

“The majority of near-Earth objects have orbits that don’t bring them very close to Earth, and therefore pose no risk of impact, but a small fraction of them – called potentially hazardous asteroids – require more attention,” according to the website of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the center dedicated to studying near-Earth objects for NASA.

All three of the other large asteroids that have passed or will pass Earth on Thursday are considerably smaller than 2002 NV16. Their sizes range from 23 to 52 meters, or 76 to 176 feet, which NASA classifies as generally similar to the size of an airplane. The most miniature among them makes its closest approach to Earth relative to the rest, at about 1.5 million miles from the surface.

A fifth asteroid will also move past Earth on Thursday, but it’s much smaller. At just 16 feet across, that one is about the size of a typical SUV. Its closest approach will happen 184,000 miles from the planet.