The average net worth of families in the United States increased nearly twofold between 1989 and 2007, when it reached 687,000 U.S. dollars. Following the financial crisis of 2008, the average net worth of Americans families dropped to 580,000 U.S. in 2013. In the following years, American families' net worth started increasing again, reaching a value of nearly 750,000 U.S. dollars.

This statistic shows the median net worth by in U.S. households by age of householder in 2011. The net worth describes personal assets minus debt. Median denotes the midpoint of a group—in this case the point at which 50 percent of the households have more wealth and 50 percent have less. In 2011, the median net worth of people aged younger than 35 was 6,676 U.S. dollars. This is much less than the median net worth of all householders, which is at approximately 69,000 U.S. dollars.

Graph and download economic data for Households; Net Worth, Level (BOGZ1FL192090005Q) from Q4 1987 to Q4 2024 about net worth, Net, households, and USA.

Graph and download economic data for Net Worth Held by the Top 0.1% (99.9th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBLTP1246) from Q3 1989 to Q4 2024 about net worth, wealth, percentile, Net, and USA.

The statistic shows the average retirement account balances of Americans between 50 and 64 as of November 2010, by pension plan. On average, Americans from the bottom 25th percentile (0 - 10,800 U.S. dollars) had 281 U.S. dollars in a KEOGH pension plan, a tax deferred pension plan available to self-employed individuals or unincorporated businesses for retirement purposes. The same income group had, on average, 9,160 U.S. dollars in IRA (individual retirement account) pension plans. Additional info: Retirement saving It is never too early to start thinking about retirement. Plans and provisions for our twilight years often get put off as we deal with life’s more pressing demands, and with solid economic recovery still far from guaranteed, savings plans have been impacted. Despite this, those who wish to enjoy the golden years of their life should save early and save often. There are a number of saving strategies and a number of possibilities available for retirement saving, and this can seem quite daunting and difficult to figure out at first. The U.S. Department of Labor recommends determining net worth to be a good place to start i.e., the total value of assets minus the value of debts. Having ascertained this, and judging by your age, you can start planning how to get the most out of your retirement savings. You should contemplate where you want to be and how you’re going to get there. If you have age on your side, you can afford to be aggressive and put money into riskier funds. If your fund loses in value, you have time to let it grow. However, if you are getting close to retirement, more intensive and low-risk saving methods are recommended.

In 2023, the real median household income for householders aged 15 to 24 was at 54,930 U.S. dollars. The highest median household income was found amongst those aged between 45 and 54. Household median income for the United States since 1990 can be accessed here.

In 2023, roughly 1.49 billion adults worldwide had a net worth of less than 10,000 U.S. dollars. By comparison, 58 million adults had a net worth of more than one million U.S. dollars in the same year. Wealth distribution The distribution of wealth is an indicator of economic inequality. The United Nations says that wealth includes the sum of natural, human, and physical assets. Wealth is not synonymous with income, however, because having a large income can be depleted if one has significant expenses. In 2023, nearly 1,700 billionaires had a total wealth between one to two billion U.S. dollars. Wealth worldwide China had the highest number of billionaires in 2023, with the United States following behind. That same year, New York had the most billionaires worldwide.

Graph and download economic data for Net Worth Held by the 50th to 90th Wealth Percentiles (WFRBLN40080) from Q3 1989 to Q4 2024 about net worth, wealth, percentile, Net, and USA.

Uruguay and Chile were the Latin American countries with the highest wealth per adult. In 2021, an Uruguayan adult had, on average, 57,726 U.S. dollars worth of financial and non-financial assets, whereas Chileans' mean wealth stood at 54,639 dollars per adult. Argentina was the country with the lowest average wealth in the region, at only 10,446 dollars per adult.

In Europe, the variation in average amounts of financial wealth per adult varied considerably as of 2022, from approximately 449,000 U.S. dollars in Switzerland to roughly 1,200 U.S. dollars in Azerbaijan. In Europe, the overall average financial wealth per adult as of 2022 was 84,308 U.S. dollars. In terms of private wealth, Europe held the second highest value in the world, after North America.

What is financial wealth?

Financial wealth, also known as financial assets or liquid assets can include wealth that an individual has in the forms of cash, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and bank deposits. In addition to financial wealth, wealth can also be measured in other assets, called non-financial wealth. This includes physical assets, such as real estate, land, vehicles, jewelry, and art, just to name a few.

Where do most wealthy individuals live?

Individuals with a net worth over one million U.S. dollars are called high-net worth individuals (HNWI). The United States was the home country to the highest number of HNWIs in 2021. China followed, although their number of HNWIs did not even reach one third of the number in the United States. In Europe, Switzerland is the country with the highest average financial wealth per adult, but with its small population size, the number of HNWIs does not come near the numbers in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Italy – the European countries with the highest number of HNWIs. Considering Switzerland’s small population size, however, it is the country in the world with the highest proportion of millionaires.

Symbols in bright yellow represent areas where more seniors with burdensome housing costs are renters, whereas symbols that are blue represent areas with more owners. Map has national coverage but opens in Milwaukee. Use the map's bookmarks or the search bar to view other cities. Bookmarks include what are generally thought of as "affordable" cities - Fresno, Salt Lake City, New Orleans, Albuquerque, El Paso, Tusla, Raleigh, Milwaukee - but yet there are many seniors whose housing costs are 30 percent or more of their income. "The burden of housing costs combined with climbing health care expenses can significantly reduce financial security at older ages" according to the Urban Institute. The number of senior households is projected to grow in the coming years, making the issue of economic security for seniors even more pressing.Housing costs are defined as burdensome if they exceed 30 percent of monthly income, a widely-used definition by HUD and others in affordable housing discussions. For owners, monthly housing costs include payments for mortgages and all other debts on the property; real estate taxes; fire, hazard, and flood insurance; utilities; fuels; and condominium or mobile home fees.For renters, monthly housing costs include contract rent plus the estimated average monthly cost of utilities (electricity, gas, and water and sewer) and fuels (oil, coal, kerosene, wood, etc.) if these are paid by the renter.Income is defined as the sum of wage/salary income; net self-employment income; interest/dividends/net rental/royalty income/income from estates & trusts; Social Security/Railroad Retirement income; Supplemental Security Income (SSI); public assistance/welfare payments; retirement/survivor/disability pensions; & all other income.Only households with a householder who is 65 and over are included in these maps. The householder is a person in whose name the home is owned, being bought, or rented, and how answers the questionnaire as person 1.This map is multi-scale, with data for states, counties, and tracts. This map uses these hosted feature layers containing the most recent American Community Survey data. These layers are part of the ArcGIS Living Atlas, and are updated every year when the American Community Survey releases new estimates, so values in the map always reflect the newest data available.

This statistic shows the average annual total money earnings of individuals in the United States in 2023, by age group. In 2023, the average worker in the United States aged 45 to 54 earned an average of 84,320 U.S. dollars per year. That made 45 to 54-year-olds the highest earning age group, on average, in 2023.

In 2023, by far the highest number of individuals with net assets of at least 30 million U.S. dollars worldwide were residing in North America, reaching over 250,000 people. Asia recorded the second highest number of UHNWIs in the world with over 165,000 individuals.A small share owns vast sums of wealthThe vast majority of global wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few people. Only one percent of the global population owns assets worth more than one million U.S. dollars. The richest people in the world are Elon Mask, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault. When it comes to women, Francoise Bettencourt Meyers led the ranking of the most affluent women worldwide. The wealth of over 70 percent of UHNWIs was self-made. Where UHNWIs live and where they leave Unsurprisingly, as North America is the world region with the highest number of UHNWIs, the United States is the country with the highest UHNWI count. However, Hong Kong, special administrative (SAR) region in China, is the city with the highest number of UHNWIs. Nevertheless, China was the country that recorded the highest outflux of UHNWIs in 2022.

In 2022, about 40 percent of adults in Mexico held a net worth under 10,000 U.S. dollars. In contrast, merely 393,000 Mexicans (that is, 0.4 percent of the total) had a net worth of over one million U.S. dollars. Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in Latin America regarding wealth distribution, with 78.7 percent of the national wealth held by the richest ten percent of the population.

The minimum salaryThe minimum wage per day guaranteed by law in Mexico was decreed to increase by 22 percent between 2021 and 2022, reaching 172.87 Mexican pesos in 2022. In the Free Zone located near the northern border the minimum daily wage was raised to 260.34 Mexican pesos.This represented the fourth consecutive incrase since 2019, but could prove to be insufficient to maintain the wellbeing of Mexican workers after the soaring inflation rate registered in 2022 and the economic impact of the COVID-19 in Mexican households. The legal minimum salary has a long history in the North American country, it was first implemented with the approval of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States in 1917. Income inequality in Latin AmericaLatin America, as other developing regions in the world, generally records high rates of inequality, with a Gini coefficient ranging between 38 and 54 among the region’s countries. Moreover, many of the countries with the biggest inequality in income distribution worldwide are found in Latin America. According to the Human Development Report 2019, wealth redistribution by means of tax transfers improves Latin America's Gini coefficient to a lesser degree than it does in advanced economies. Wider access to education and health services, on the other hand, have been proven to have a greater direct effect in improving Gini coefficient measurements in the region.

In the first quarter of 2024, almost two-thirds percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 2.5 percent of the total wealth. Income inequality in the U.S. Despite the idea that the United States is a country where hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps will inevitably lead to success, this is often not the case. In 2023, 7.4 percent of U.S. households had an annual income under 15,000 U.S. dollars. With such a small percentage of people in the United States owning such a vast majority of the country’s wealth, the gap between the rich and poor in America remains stark. The top one percent The United States follows closely behind China as the country with the most billionaires in the world. Elon Musk alone held around 219 billion U.S. dollars in 2022. Over the past 50 years, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio has exploded, causing the gap between rich and poor to grow, with some economists theorizing that this gap is the largest it has been since right before the Great Depression.

This statistic shows the median household income in the United States from 1990 to 2023 in 2023 U.S. dollars. The median household income was 80,610 U.S. dollars in 2023, an increase from the previous year. Household incomeThe median household income depicts the income of households, including the income of the householder and all other individuals aged 15 years or over living in the household. Income includes wages and salaries, unemployment insurance, disability payments, child support payments received, regular rental receipts, as well as any personal business, investment, or other kinds of income received routinely. The median household income in the United States varies from state to state. In 2020, the median household income was 86,725 U.S. dollars in Massachusetts, while the median household income in Mississippi was approximately 44,966 U.S. dollars at that time. Household income is also used to determine the poverty line in the United States. In 2021, about 11.6 percent of the U.S. population was living in poverty. The child poverty rate, which represents people under the age of 18 living in poverty, has been growing steadily over the first decade since the turn of the century, from 16.2 percent of the children living below the poverty line in year 2000 to 22 percent in 2010. In 2021, it had lowered to 15.3 percent. The state with the widest gap between the rich and the poor was New York, with a Gini coefficient score of 0.51 in 2019. The Gini coefficient is calculated by looking at average income rates. A score of zero would reflect perfect income equality and a score of one indicates a society where one person would have all the money and all other people have nothing.

In 2023, Switzerland led the ranking of countries with the highest average wealth per adult, with approximately 709,600 U.S. dollars per person. Luxembourg was ranked second with an average wealth of around 607,500 U.S. dollars per adult, followed by Hong Kong SAR. However, the figures do not show the actual distribution of wealth. The Gini index shows wealth disparities in countries worldwide. Does wealth guarantee a longer life? As the old adage goes “money can’t buy you happiness”, yet wealth and income are continuously correlated to the quality of life of individuals in different countries around the world. While greater levels of wealth may not guarantee a higher quality life, it certainly increases an individual’s chances of having a longer one. Although they do not show the whole picture, life expectancy at birth is higher in the more wealthier world regions. Does money bring happiness? A number of the world’s happiest nations also feature in the list of those countries for which average income was highest. Finland, however, which was the happiest country worldwide in 2022, is missing in the list of top twenty countries with the highest wealth per adult. As such, the explanation for this may be the fact that the larger proportion of the population has access to a high income relative to global levels. Measures of quality of life Criticism of the use of income or wealth as a proxy for quality of life led to the creation of the United Nations’ Human Development Index. Although income is included within the index, it also has other factors taken into account such as health and education. As such, the countries with the highest human development index can be correlated to those with the highest income levels. That said, none of the above measures seek to assess the physical and mental environmental impact of a high quality of life sourced through high incomes. The happy planet index demonstrates that the inclusion of experienced well-being and ecological footprint in place of income and other proxies for quality of life results in many of the world’s materially poorer nations being included in the happiest.

In 2023, an estimate of 27.8 million Colombian adults had a net worth of less than 10 thousand U.S. dollars. In contrast, the total net assets of approximately 38 thousand people above 18 years old in the South American country surpassed one million dollars. Colombia is among the most unequal countries in Latin America.

In 2023, the gross median household income for Asian households in the United States stood at 112,800 U.S. dollars. Median household income in the United States, of all racial and ethnic groups, came out to 80,610 U.S. dollars in 2023. Asian and Caucasian (white not Hispanic) households had relatively high median incomes, while the median income of Hispanic, Black, American Indian, and Alaskan Native households all came in lower than the national median. A number of related statistics illustrate further the current state of racial inequality in the United States. Unemployment is highest among Black or African American individuals in the U.S. with 8.6 percent unemployed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2021. Hispanic individuals (of any race) were most likely to go without health insurance as of 2021, with 22.8 percent uninsured.

In the first quarter of 2024, 51.8 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by members of the baby boomer generation. In comparison, millennials own around 9.4 percent of total wealth in the U.S. In terms of population distribution, there is almost an equal share of millennials and baby boomers in the United States.