This survey, also known as the Family Expenditure Survey or FAMEX, was designed to provide socio-economic information on families and unattached individuals in private households in the 10 provinces and the cities of Whitehorse and Yellowknife. All other residents of the Yukon and Northwest Territories, Indian reservation residents, 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 Whitehorse and Yellowknife have been excluded from this dataset. The data is divided in to regions (Atlantic provinces, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and British Columbia). Data was collected in the beginning of 1987 for the reference period of 1986. Statistics Canada provides a public use microdata file.

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