FOX News reported that Gen Z borrowers’ credit scores have fallen to an average of 676. That number doesn’t just measure financial responsibility. It measures exhaustion. It shows a generation pushed to the edge and forced to make impossible choices.
People are not living carelessly. They are paying rent, buying food, filling gas tanks, covering heat and insurance. They are doing everything the system expects of them. When the money runs out before the month does, the credit card payment is what gets skipped. That is not irresponsibility. It is survival.
A FICO score of 676 sounds like a statistic until you understand what it means in real life. It is the lowest of any generation working today. It means the financial floor has cracked. It means that even the people who follow every rule still fall through. The price of rent alone explains most of it. In many cities, a small apartment now costs half a paycheck. Groceries have risen more than 25 % since 2020. Cars, insurance, and utilities rise faster than wages. The math no longer adds up.
Banks see the same numbers. Lenders pull back. Credit limits shrink. Interest rates climb. The cycle feeds on itself. Scores fall because payments are missed, but payments are missed because costs have outgrown income. Every 20 points lost on a FICO score quietly raises the cost of borrowing for years. It punishes people twice.
The gap between Gen Z’s 676 and the national average of 715 looks small until you realize what it blocks. That gap locks people out of apartments, jobs, and insurance plans. A low score does not only raise interest rates. It closes doors. It creates a class of citizens who can no longer rent, work, or borrow on fair terms.
Student loans have deepened the slide. When the pandemic pause ended, delinquencies returned. About one in three Gen Z borrowers has student debt, and once those missed payments hit credit reports, the damage was immediate. A single late student loan can drop a FICO score by more than eighty points. Multiply that across millions of accounts and the collapse begins to look less like personal failure and more like policy failure.
The people at the top will not feel this. They call it a “market correction.” They say young people should be more disciplined. They say the economy is fine. Meanwhile, the young live in shared apartments, work multiple jobs, and still cannot save. The cost of living has become a moral test. It decides who gets to have a home, who can start a family, and who will spend adulthood climbing out of debt.
Older generations sometimes call this irresponsibility. They forget what the numbers mean. You cannot budget your way out of structural inflation. You cannot cut enough corners when every essential has doubled in cost. Credit cannot build wealth when it has become a penalty.
The next phase is predictable. Defaults will rise. Lenders will tighten further. Consumption will slow. Home ownership will fall. Every point shaved off the national FICO average removes billions of dollars from future spending and investment. Each month of decline makes recovery harder. This is how inequality grows without a sound. It hides in credit reports, in denied applications, in the quiet panic that comes when another bill arrives and the paycheck is already gone.