Median and average net worth by age for United States households

The survey groups households by the age of the reference person and publishes both a median and a mean for each group. Wealth rises with age until the mid-seventies and then falls back, which is what a life-cycle pattern looks like: property is bought and paid down, retirement accounts accumulate, and then assets are drawn on.

Read down the median column and the life-cycle pattern is orderly. Read the ratio column on the right and something else appears: in every single age band the mean is several times the median, and the multiple is largest in the older bands where wealth is most concentrated.

Federal Reserve Bulletin, October 2023, table 2. Figures are in 2022 dollars; the original table is stated in thousands.

The median is the midpoint of the distribution: half of households hold less than it, half hold more. That makes it the only one of the two figures that describes a household you might actually meet.

Across all households the 2022 survey puts the median at $192,900. A household comparing itself against that number is comparing itself against the middle of the country, which is almost always what the comparison is for. Every median net worth by age figure on this page is read the same way: the midpoint of its own age band. The survey cuts the same wealth by income as well: net worth by income percentile answers the peer question rather than the life-stage one.

The mean for all households in the same survey is $1,063,700, about five and a half times the median. Nothing changed in the underlying data between those two sentences; the mean is simply the total wealth of all households divided by their number, and a small number of very large balance sheets pull it upward. The published top-percentile threshold is where those balance sheets sit.

This is why average net worth by age is the figure most often quoted and the one least worth quoting. It answers a question about aggregates while appearing to answer a question about people. Where a headline says the average American household holds a million dollars, the median household holds under two hundred thousand, and both statements come from the same table.

Median household wealth by age of the reference person, 2022 survey. Bars are drawn to scale against the highest band; the outlined box behind each bar is that maximum.

The unit is a household (technically a "primary economic unit") rather than an individual, and the age band is set by the reference person within it. That means a household figure covers a couple’s combined position, and a single-person household and a two-earner couple appear in the same distribution.

Net worth itself is defined as assets minus liabilities: property, retirement and financial accounts, vehicles and business interests on one side; mortgages, student loans, credit balances and other debts on the other. Future entitlements such as a defined-benefit pension are not balances and do not enter the calculation, which understates the position of households that hold one. The same definition, applied to a single household, is set out on its own page.

Every group in the survey gained, and the largest proportional gains were at the bottom, from a very low base. The table below is the same table read across time rather than across age, and it is a useful corrective to both of the usual narratives about this release.

The +900% for the least wealthy quarter is real and reflects a base of a few hundred dollars: the mean for that group in 2022 is still negative, at about −$5,300.