The Survey of Family Expenditures, also known as the Family Expenditure Survey or FAMEX, was designed to provide socio-economic information on families and unattached individuals (spending units) living in private households in 17 major cities of Canada as well as the cities of Whitehorse and Yellowknife. Institutional populations and families of official representatives of foreign countries were not included in the survey. Part-year spending units, records for which the risk of identification warranted their exclusion, and all records from Charlottetown and Summerside were excluded from this dataset.

Data was collected in the beginning of 1985 for the reference period of 1984.

In 1997 the Survey of Family Expenditures was integrated into the Survey of Household Spending.

Statistics Canada provides a public use microdata file.