One of the most striking findings of the UK Youth Poll 2026 was the fall in the number of young people who think their lives will eventually be better than their parents’. In 2025, 63% thought that this would be the case. In 2026, the figure has collapsed to 36%. The big question here is why? What is driving this precipitous decline?
One of the benefits of running the UK Youth Poll annually is that we can compare drivers of young people’s perceptions between the two years.[1] To make this more digestible, I look at six different sets of drivers in turn: demographics; economic status; key anxieties; views of democracy; political efficacy; and political preferences.[2]
The big story that emerges is the dramatic shift that has happened across all young people. No group has been insulated against the decline in the sense that their lives will eventually be better than those of their parents. Nonetheless, we also see several areas in which young people’s characteristics or views have become more closely associated with thinking that they will be worse off.
Demographics
In 2026, people at the latter stages of their youth are more likely than their younger counterparts to think that their lives will be worse than their parents’. This was not the case in 2025. It might be that the realities of work, housing, and strained finances, which the youngest are more likely to be insulated against, are taking their toll on these older young people. This explanation does not necessarily extend to the other changing relationship that we observe in relation to ethnicity.
In both years, young Black and Asian people were less likely than young White or Mixed people to think they will be worse off. This may be because, even if they are not particularly positive about their futures, they are aware of how hard life was for previous generations of ethnic minorities in the UK. Young Black and Asian people have become more likely to think that their lives will be worse than their parents’ in 2026, but the big shift is in the other ethnic groups, both of which have become much more likely to think it. The pattern is the same in both years, but the gulf is much wider in 2026, particularly between young Black people and the other groups.[3] As for gender, we see no difference between men and women in either year. It’s just that both men and women have become much more likely to think they’ll be worse off in 2026.[4]
The small reduction in young people’s negative perceptions of their future lives that was associated with having a degree in 2025 is no longer statistically significant in 2026. But there is an increasing regional divide. In 2026, the further young people are from London, the more likely they are to think their lives will be worse than their parents. This speaks to issues of uneven distribution of economic development and opportunities, and sense that some areas of the country are neglected by the capital. Finally in terms of demographics, whilst all young people feel worse about their future lives in 2026, those with a religion have been slightly insulated from this increasing negativity.
Economic status
In 2025, young people who were not working long term were more likely to think they would be worse off than their parents. In 2026 they have become even more likely to think this, but they have been caught up by people in all other work statuses. Being in work no longer protects young people from the sense that they can’t count on having a better life than their parents. Similarly, the psychological benefit of not living with your parents that existed in 2025 has been eroded in 2026. Young people who are still living with their parents have become much more likely to think that they will be worse off, perhaps because they have a daily reminder of what their parents’ lives are like, but renters and owner-occupiers have caught up with them. And the insulating effect of high income has also been eroded. Young people earning £55,000 or more are still less likely than those with incomes below this threshold to think their lives will be worse. But the size of this effect has reduced in 2026, and both groups have become more likely to think they will be worse off. In short, everyone is feeling the pinch.
Key anxieties
We also see that the anxieties that young people are carrying around with them are prompting them to reappraise the belief that their prospects will be better than their parents’. In 2025, young people who said that financial, housing, and relationship anxieties were important to them were no more or less likely than others to think that they would be worse off than their parents. In 2026, those with financial and housing anxieties are more likely than others to have that belief, whilst those concerned about their relationships are less likely than others to hold that view. Perhaps having your attention drawn away from economics to relationships, and worries associated with them, takes the heat out of the financial and housing concerns that are increasingly driving the sense that life is getting worse than it was for previous generations.
Views of democracy
As with daily anxieties, young people’s views of the state of democracy are also starting to matter for their sense of whether their lives will be better or worse than those of their parents. In 2026, holding the views that UK democracy is in trouble and that political trust is one of the most important issues facing the country are associated with believing that one’s life will be worse. By contrast, the slightly reduced likelihood of holding that belief that was associated with viewing politics as honourable in 2025 has disappeared. This all speaks of a political hopelessness that is increasingly driving views of the prospects for one’s own life, even as young people in general are viewing their futures in a more negative light.
Political efficacy
In both years, the view that one’s vote counts is associated with being less likely to think that your life will be worse than your parents’, but the effect reduced slightly in 2026. Similarly, the insulation provided by thinking that politics is irrelevant to your life, which existed in 2025, has now disappeared. And whilst the number of political activities done in the last year did not have a statistically significant relationship with the sense of how one’s life will be in 2025, in 2026 being more politically active is associated with greater likelihood of thinking that one’s life will be worse.[5] This suggests that young people with negative views of their prospective lives are being driven to political action, or that those who regularly engage with politics are more exposed to signals that their lives will get worse.
Political preferences
Having voted for a challenger party (such as Reform UK or the Greens) in 2024 has, in 2026, become associated with thinking that one’s life will be worse. Again, young people who voted for traditional parties (Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat) in 2024 have also become more negative about their life prospects, but challenger party supporters have moved further. In terms of ideology, right-wing young people have become more negative in 2026, and centrists have caught up with them, but left-wingers have outpaced both groups in their more negative views of their future lives. Finally, thinking that young people are treated fairly compared to older generations is linked to being less likely have a negative view of one’s future life in both years, though the effect has reduced slightly from 2025 to 2026.
What’s going on?
Young people are feeling worse about their future lives compared to those of their parents. This applies across the board. There are no groups that are particularly pulling up the average, and there are only a few groups that have been slightly insulated from the growing negativity. This points to wider contextual factors that are affecting everyone.
It is not difficult to see how this might be the case at a time when Alan Milburn’s report on young people not in education, employment or training argues that opportunities for them are ‘not growing, they’re shrinking.’ Indeed, with the risk of a ‘lost generation’ on the horizon, young people are facing the combination of declining opportunities and growing awareness of how hard things are likely to be. Young people can only endure this grind for so long before, understandably, their sense that their future lives will be better is eroded.
Footnotes
[1] We expect there to be variation in answers to questions over time and between different survey samples, even when the samples are recruited in the same way each year, but the change is too large to be accounted for by those factors alone.[2] To conduct the analysis, I used survey questions that were asked identically or very similarly in 2025 and 2026 and ran weighted logistic regression models for each year (with all variables coded into the same categories). The dependent variable in the two models was a binary variable indicating whether respondents thought that their lives will be worse than their parents’. Figures are margins plots showing the predicted probability of thinking that your life will be worse than your parents.’ All of the other variables that this blog covers were included as independent variables in the two models. Full logistic regression results from the 2025 and 2026 models, using odds ratios, are available here.[3] We also include young people with other ethnicities than ‘White,’ ‘Mixed,’ ‘Asian’ or ‘Black’ in the figure, but there are too few of them in the sample to be confident about the views of the wider group in the population, again shown by the wide confidence intervals around the estimates in the figure.[4] We include young people with other gender identities than ‘Man’ or ‘Woman’ in the figure, but there are too few of them in the sample to be confident about the views of the wider group in the population, as shown by the wide confidence intervals around the estimates in the figure.[5] Political activity was measured by counting how many of 12 different political or civic acts young people indicated they had done in the last 12 months.