US Net Worth Percentile (2026): 82% Are Below Average

Search for American net worth figures and you will be handed an average. It is the wrong statistic, and it is wrong in a specific, measurable direction that this page quantifies.

What is the median net worth in the US?

$192,700 for an American family, from the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances. That is the midpoint of the whole distribution.

The survey runs every three years and measures the family unit rather than the individual, so a couple is counted once. It is the reference wealth survey for the United States, and every figure on this page is computed from its public data or taken from its published tables, never repeated from a secondary source.

Why are 82% of American families below average?

Because a mean is not a midpoint. A small number of very large fortunes pull the average up, while the median stays where the typical family actually is.

Place the average back onto the distribution it came from and it lands at roughly the 82nd percentile. A family holding exactly the average American net worth is wealthier than about 82% of American families. That is the whole problem with the number in one sentence.

So when a headline reports that the average American is worth a million dollars, it is arithmetically true and practically useless. Use the median, or better, use your own age band.

What net worth puts you in the top 10% in the US?

About $1.94 million. The full ladder, in family net worth:

Computed from the Survey of Consumer Finances 2022 public data, weighted across all five imputations. Points between published percentiles are interpolated.

The top decile begins at about 10 times the median. That multiple is the clearest single measure of how stretched the American distribution is, and it is roughly double the equivalent multiple in Canada.

What is a good net worth by age in the US?

Age explains more of the variation than any other single factor, so this is the table to compare yourself against rather than the national median.

Notice the last row. Median net worth peaks for families aged 65 to 74 and then falls for those 75 and older, because retirement is the stage where accumulated wealth is spent rather than added to. A declining number there is the system working, not failing.

Owning a home is the single biggest divide

Nothing else in the Federal Reserve's data separates families as sharply. Homeowners hold a median of $396,200. Renters hold $10,400.

That is a factor of 38. Part of it is that buying requires savings in the first place, so the causation runs both ways. But a mortgage is also a forced savings plan that runs for thirty years whether or not anyone is paying attention, and rent buys no equity at all. Both effects push the same direction.

If you rent, the practical consequence is that your net worth only grows on purpose. There is no asset quietly appreciating in the background, which makes the contribution rate on a retirement account, and the rate on the cash beside it, the levers you have.

How much does education change net worth?

A college degree is associated with a median net worth of $464,600, against $106,800 for a high school diploma. The gap is about 4.4 times.

Note where the jump actually is. Moving from a high school diploma to some college adds about $30,000 at the median. Finishing the degree adds another $328,000. The return is almost entirely in completion, not attendance, which is the opposite of how the decision is usually framed to an eighteen-year-old.

Net worth by race and ethnicity

The Federal Reserve publishes this breakdown, and the spread is wider than any other in the survey apart from housing status.

A white non-Hispanic family holds about 6.3 times the median wealth of a Black non-Hispanic family. Asian families, reported separately for the first time in the 2022 survey, hold the highest median at $536,000. These gaps are substantially larger than the corresponding income gaps, because wealth compounds across generations in a way income does not.

What is the average net worth by state?

The Survey of Consumer Finances does not publish it, and that is worth knowing before you trust a table that does.

The survey is designed to represent the United States as a whole. Its sample is deliberately weighted toward wealthy households to capture the top of the distribution accurately, and it is not large enough to produce reliable estimates state by state. The Federal Reserve does not publish a state breakdown for that reason.

The closest thing it does publish is a metropolitan split: families inside a metropolitan statistical area hold a median of $199,200 against $146,400 outside one. Any site presenting a full fifty-state ranking has modelled those numbers from other data, which may be reasonable, but it is an estimate rather than a survey result and should be read as one.

Where net worth sits against income

Income and wealth are related but far from the same thing, and the Federal Reserve publishes the cross-tab that shows how loosely.

A family in the top 10% of incomes holds a median of $2.56 million, roughly 183 times a family in the bottom fifth. Income differences across the same range are nothing like that wide. Wealth amplifies income gaps rather than reflecting them, which is the mechanism behind most of the other tables on this page.

Has American net worth gone up since 2019?

Sharply. Median family net worth rose 37% between the 2019 and 2022 surveys, from $141,100 to $192,900 in constant 2022 dollars.

That is the largest three-year increase the survey has recorded, and it was unusually broad: every age band, every education level and both housing groups rose. The under-35 median more than doubled, from $16,100 to $39,000.

The main driver was house prices, with pandemic-era transfers and a strong labour market behind it. Which is worth holding lightly: a rise driven by asset prices can be given back by asset prices, and the 2025 survey will be the first read on whether it held.

What to do with this

Compare against your own age band, not the national median, and never against the mean. After that the tables above mostly point at two levers.

Run the net worth percentile calculator to place yourself properly against both. If the gap you find is mostly a retirement-savings gap, the 401(k) calculator shows what a change in contribution rate does over the years you have left, including the employer match, which is the highest guaranteed return most people can access. The compound interest calculator shows how much of a final balance comes from growth rather than contributions, and the mortgage calculator prices the other lever, given that a 38x gap sits between owners and renters.

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