Time: Millionaires of 1925
The Million Dollar Question: In 1924 and 1925, an act of Congress required one specific fact about every American who filed an income tax return to be made available to the public. What was it?
A) Their total income B) The amount of tax they paid C) Their net worth D) Their occupationRead on for the answer.
For two years in the middle of the 1920s, the question this site exists to ask had an answer you could look up.
Not an estimate. Not a rich list assembled from gossip and reputation, of the kind the New-York Tribune had produced in 1892 and Forbes would produce ninety years later. An actual federal disclosure, printed in newspapers, of what named Americans had paid the government. It lasted two rounds, it was struck at once by a Supreme Court case that made it more public rather than less, and Congress killed it in February 1926.
1925 is the year that window was open, and it is also the year The Great Gatsby was published — 10 April, Scribner’s, a first printing of 20,870 copies at two dollars. So the year gives us both things at once: the most durable cultural image of American wealth ever made, and a set of federal numbers against which to check it. They do not agree.
The year you could look it up
Section 257(b) of the Revenue Act of 1924 directed the Commissioner of Internal Revenue to prepare, in the office of the collector in every internal revenue district, “lists containing the name and the post office address of each person making an income tax return in such district, together with the amount of the income tax paid by such person.”
Read that carefully, because almost every retelling gets it wrong. The answer to the Million Dollar Question is B. What became public was a name, a mailing address, and one dollar figure: tax paid. Not income, not deductions, not the return itself. Everything else had to be inferred backward — and, as we will see, inferred badly.
The disclosure was also awkwardly paired with a criminal statute. Section 1018 of the same act reenacted Revised Statutes § 3167, making it a misdemeanour to “print or publish in any manner whatever not provided by law any income return, or any part thereof.” Treasury opened the lists in late October 1924 and, essentially the same day, warned that publishing them might be a crime. The New York Times published anyway on its lawyers’ advice; its 24 October 1924 front page ran the Rockefeller and Ford figures. The Wall Street Journal mostly held back. Prosecutions followed in Kansas City and Baltimore.
Both prosecutions died on 25 May 1925. In United States v. Dickey, Justice Sutherland, writing for the Court, affirmed the dismissal of an indictment against two Kansas City newspapermen, holding that information Congress had gone out of its way to make available “cannot be regarded otherwise than as public property, to be passed on to others as freely as the possessors of it may choose,” and that “to the extent provided by § 257(b), Congress meant to abandon the policy of secrecy altogether, and to exclude from the operation of § 3167 all forms of publicity.” The companion case, United States v. Baltimore Post, is two sentences long and decided on Dickey’s authority alone — it holds nothing separately, contrary to how it is often cited. Notably, the Court decided the question as pure statutory construction, expressly assuming for the sake of argument that Congress had the power to forbid or allow such publication either way, and so never reached the First Amendment at all.
So the second round, released between 1 and 20 September 1925, was published freely. It was also the last. The Revenue Act of 1926, signed 26 February 1926, rewrote § 257(e) to require lists containing only “the name and the post-office address of each person making an income-tax return” — the money came out. And while the act’s income tax title was made retroactive to 1 January 1925, § 286 carved out the whole of § 257 and made it effective on enactment instead.
Which produces a fact worth being precise about: there is no public list of tax paid on 1925 income. The lists published in September 1925 showed tax paid in 1925 on 1924 income. The 1925-income lists would have been compiled during 1926, after the amounts had been stripped out. The last year of American individual tax transparency is 1924, disclosed in the autumn of 1925. Getting this off by one year is the easiest error in the whole story.
What the lists actually said
The 1924 disclosures, covering 1923 income, produced the headline numbers everyone quotes. John D. Rockefeller Jr. paid $7,435,169 — the figure in the Times headline; other sources circulate $7,435,189 and $7,435,160.41, so treat it as “about $7.4 million.” Henry Ford paid $2,467,946 per the Wall Street Journal; the Ford family and the Ford Motor Company together came to $18,902,981. J.P. Morgan Jr. paid $98,643.67. Charles M. Schwab paid $29,494.38.
The September 1925 round, covering 1924 income, ran Rockefeller Jr. at roughly $6,278,000 (a rounded figure, as reported two years later by Stuart Chase in the Times), the two Fords together at about $4.8 million, and Andrew Mellon — the sitting Treasury Secretary who had designed the rate cuts — fourth on the national list at nearly $1.9 million.
The lists were a sensation, and they were also the beginning of a durable misunderstanding, which contemporaries spotted immediately. If you know only the tax, you cannot recover the income. A Wall Street Journal piece of 10 November 1924 identified the reason plainly: tax-exempt bonds. Under what became § 213(b)(4) of the 1926 act, interest on state, territorial and municipal obligations was excluded from gross income altogether, which meant it escaped the surtax as well as the normal tax. A fortune parked in municipals threw off income the government never saw and the newspaper lists never registered. The elective 12½% ceiling on capital gains — available on assets held more than two years — did similar work at the top.
The lists therefore did not show who was rich. They showed who was rich in a taxable way. That distinction is the whole reason a wealth tax argument still runs a century later, and it was visible in the newspapers of 1924 to anyone reading closely.
The income, and the multiple
Now the arithmetic that the 1900 instalment of this series set up, run twenty-five years later.
A million dollars in 1925 was still a claim on an income stream. Frederick Macaulay’s adjusted index of high-grade American railroad bond yields — the same NBER series used for 1900, now carried on FRED — runs between 4.390% and 4.500% across the twelve months of 1925, for a mean of 4.45%. Moody’s Aaa corporates averaged 4.88% that year; Baa, 6.27%; long-dated US governments, 3.86%.
Take the same benchmark as before. A million dollars in high-grade rails produced about $44,500 a year in 1925 — up from $31,800 in 1900, because yields had risen by well over a point.
The denominator moved much further. Stanley Lebergott’s estimates, printed in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 as series D 723–724, put average annual money earnings for all American employees in 1925 at $1,317 when employed, or $1,253 after deducting for unemployment. Note what this is: a reconstruction. The government’s own national-income series in the same table, D 722, does not begin until 1929. There was no official all-industry earnings statistic for 1925, and Lebergott’s number is the only one there is.
$44,500 divided by $1,317 is 33.8.
In 1900 the same calculation gave 76. In a quarter of a century, the income from a million dollars fell from seventy-six average working lives a year to about thirty-four — and it fell while the nominal coupon rose by forty per cent, because average earnings had more than tripled.
Run it in 2026. The ten-year Treasury closed at 4.79% on 2 September, so a million dollars in the safest paper yields about $47,900. Average weekly earnings for private-sector employees were $1,290.37 in July 2026, or roughly $67,100 annualised. $47,900 divided by $67,100 is 0.71.
Seventy-six, to thirty-four, to seven-tenths.
The 1925-to-2026 collapse is a factor of 47.3, and it decomposes cleanly into three parts that multiply: yields are slightly higher now (a factor of 0.93, working against the drop), consumer prices rose about nineteen-fold, and the average American worker got about 2.7 times richer in real terms. 0.93 × 19.05 × 2.67 = 47.3. Inflation is the largest term by a distance — in log terms it does about three-quarters of the work, and real wage gains do almost all of the remaining quarter. But the conversion everyone reaches for is still the least interesting number in the paragraph: $1 million in 1925 is about $18.4 million in 2025 dollars, or about $19 million measured against July 2026 prices.
What the government took
Here is where 1925 differs sharply from 1900, and also from what most people assume about the Coolidge years.
In 1900 the federal government took nothing from the coupon. In 1925 it took a real if modest slice, and the rate that applied was the subject of an unusually blatant piece of retroactive legislation.
The Revenue Act of 1924, as enacted, imposed a top marginal rate of 46 per cent on net income over $500,000. That was the law on the books throughout calendar 1925. Then the Revenue Act of 1926, signed 26 February 1926, replaced it — and § 286 provides that the income tax title “shall take effect as of January 1, 1925.” The new schedule was a normal tax graduating to 5% plus a surtax reaching, verbatim, “$11,660 upon net incomes of $100,000; and upon net incomes in excess of $100,000, in addition 20 per centum of such excess.”
So the top rate on 1925 income, as finally assessed, was 25 per cent over $100,000, not 46 per cent over $500,000. The threshold fell by four-fifths and the rate fell by nearly half, retroactively, seventeen days before returns were due on 15 March 1926. Nobody with a million dollars ever computed a 1925 liability at 1924-act rates. (That last observation is my inference from the filing calendar, not a claim I found stated in a source.)
Work the actual bill. Take a single man living on $44,500 of taxable bond interest. The normal tax under § 210(a) runs 1½% on the first $4,000 above his $1,500 exemption, 3% on the next $4,000, and 5% on the rest — $1,930. The surtax under § 211(a), computed on net income before the personal exemption, is $2,240 at the $44,000 step plus 12% of the $500 above it — $2,300. Against that he gets the § 209 earned-income credit, which applies even though he earns nothing, because the statute deems the first $5,000 of anyone’s net income to be earned — and caps earned net income at $20,000, which is why the credit is trivial at the top. It comes to a shade over thirteen dollars.
Total: $4,216.88, an effective rate of 9.48 per cent.
The estate tax has the same retroactive shape and a larger price tag. A decedent dying in 1925 fell under the Revenue Act of 1924’s Title III — a $50,000 exemption and rates running from 1% to a top of 40% over $10 million, with a credit for state death taxes capped at 25% of the federal bill. Section 322 of the 1926 act cut that top rate to 25% and made the cut effective “as of June 2, 1924,” and § 325 ordered that anything already collected above the new figure “shall be refunded without interest.” Treasury puts the refund at roughly $250 million. The 1926 act’s own, gentler estate tax — $100,000 exemption, 20% top rate, and the 80% state death tax credit that shaped state estate taxes for the next seventy-five years, until it was phased out between 2002 and 2004 — applied only to deaths after 26 February 1926, so a 1925 death missed it. Note that the IRS’s own historical table lists 40% for 1924–25; it is describing the law as originally enacted, not as finally assessed. The statute controls.
There was also, briefly, a gift tax. Enacted by the 1924 act, cut back by the Supreme Court in Blodgett v. Holden so that it reached only gifts made after 2 June 1924, retroactively reduced to a 1–25% schedule by § 324 of the 1926 act, and repealed as of 1 January 1926. 1925 was the last taxable year for lifetime gifts until 1932 — which is to say that a wealthy American who had been watching Congress could give away a fortune in 1926 and pay nothing.
Gatsby’s actual numbers
The novel published that April is the reason most people have any picture of 1925 wealth at all, so it is worth checking what is actually in it.
Not much, in dollar terms. The full text contains ten explicit sums. Nick Carraway rents his house on West Egg for “eighty dollars a month,” between two places that go for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. A party guest mentions having had over twelve hundred dollars at Monte Carlo. Gatsby sends a woman a replacement gown costing $265. Tom Buchanan gave Daisy a string of pearls valued at $350,000 before the wedding. Dan Cody left Gatsby a legacy of $25,000 that he never received. A puppy costs ten dollars, Tom’s petrol at Wilson’s garage costs a dollar twenty, and a young and hungry Gatsby once ate more than four dollars’ worth of food in half an hour. The last two sums are the only ones written with a dollar sign: the boyhood schedule found in Gatsby’s book, where a resolution to save $5.00 a week has been crossed out and replaced with $3.00.
That is the entire ledger. Nick’s salary is never given — his father simply agreed to finance him for a year. Gatsby’s shirts, the most famous luxury object in American fiction, have no price; the scene works precisely because Fitzgerald declines to name one. Tom’s fortune is conveyed by a single social fact, that he brought a string of polo ponies east from Lake Forest, and by Nick’s astonishment that a man his own age could do that.
Fitzgerald was writing about a stratum he had studied at close range and could not afford. His most-quoted essay on the subject, “How to Live on $36,000 a Year”, ran in the Saturday Evening Post of 5 April 1924. The essay itself gives budget figures rather than accounts; it is the Library of America’s editors, reading his ledger, who put his 1923 earnings at $28,750 against roughly $36,000 spent — in a country where the average employee made a little over $1,300. He was, in other words, an extremely well-paid writer who lived like someone considerably richer, which is a different thing from being rich and is arguably the actual subject of his novel.
The book did not sell. Scribner’s printed 23,870 copies across two 1925 runs and the first printing did not clear until June 1926 — the novel was dead in the market before the end of its publication year. Fitzgerald’s Scribner royalty statement for August 1940, four months before his death, reported forty copies of all his books sold, seven of them Gatsby, for a payment of $13.13.
What the money bought
The 1900 piece found that the defining expense of a rich American household was other people’s time, and that it was startlingly cheap. By 1925 that had already begun to change, and the change is the least appreciated fact about the decade.
George Stigler’s NBER monograph Domestic Servants in the United States, 1900–1940 counts servants against private families at each census. In 1900, 94.3 per thousand families. In 1910, 93.1. In 1920, 61.3 — a thirty-four per cent collapse in a single decade. By 1930 the ratio had recovered to 67.7. The counts are decennial, so there is no 1925 observation at all, and the ratio was rising between the two censuses that bracket it; Stigler also warns that part of the 1920 drop may be an undercount. What the numbers will support is narrower than the usual claim: by the census immediately before Gatsby, the staffed household of the popular imagination had already contracted by a third from 1900, and it had done so before the Jazz Age started rather than during it.
I cannot tell you what a servant cost in 1925, and neither can Stigler — he is explicit that the wage evidence is too thin to trace within the period, and jumps from a mean of $3.16 a week around 1899 straight to $7.22 a week in 1939. Anyone who quotes you a 1925 servant wage is interpolating. The best-documented single household of the era is Otto Kahn’s Oheka Castle on Long Island, reportedly built for $11 million and staffed by 126 full-time servants — figures that come from the property’s own history page rather than an archive, and should be held loosely.
What got dramatically cheaper instead was manufactured goods, and here the numbers are hard. There were 17,481,001 registered automobiles in the United States in 1925, per the Federal Highway Administration’s historical series, and 20,068,543 motor vehicles of all kinds — against 8,131,522 automobiles and 9,239,161 vehicles five years earlier. Ford’s own museum records the runabout pickup introduced in April 1925 at $281, about a fifth of an average worker’s annual earnings.
That is the shape of the century in one comparison. Between 1900 and 1925 the car went from an aristocratic toy to something a wage-earner could buy on time, while the servant-to-family ratio that had held flat through the Gilded Age fell by a third. Whether wages did that is a guess, not a finding — the wage series does not exist, and factory work competing for the same labour is at least as good an explanation. What is documented is the direction. Modern luxury is what is left when you run that divergence for another hundred years.
What people get wrong
That the newspapers published people’s incomes. They published names, addresses and tax paid. Income was never disclosed and cannot be reliably recovered from the tax figure, because municipal bond interest was excluded from gross income entirely and the capital gains election capped a great deal else at 12½%.
That the 1925 lists showed 1925 income. They showed 1924 income. There is no published list of tax paid on 1925 income, because the Revenue Act of 1926 stripped the dollar amounts out with immediate effect while making everything else retroactive.
That the top rate in 1925 was 46%. That was the 1924 act’s schedule, in force on the books all year and superseded before a single 1925 return was filed. The rate actually assessed was 25% over $100,000.
That Baltimore Post decided something separate from Dickey. It did not. The opinion is two sentences and rests on Dickey alone. Both are publication cases, and neither reached the First Amendment.
That there were tens of thousands of American millionaires in 1925. Nobody knows, and the round numbers circulating online are untraceable. What is documented is narrower and stranger: IRS Statistics of Income for 1925 records 207 individual returns reporting net income of $1,000,000 or more — 0.005% of the 4,171,051 returns filed, together accounting for 1.93% of all reported net income and 9.1% of all individual income tax. Only 9,560 returns in the entire country fell in the classes of $100,000 and over. But those are income millionaires, a flow, not a stock; at 1925 yields a million-dollar income implied twenty million or more of capital. Someone holding exactly $1 million in taxable rails would have reported around $44,500 and sat unremarkably in the $25,000–$50,000 class alongside 59,721 others — and someone holding the same million in municipals would have appeared on no bracket table at all, which is the point of the previous section. The nearest thing to a wealth count is the estate side: of the 13,142 resident-decedent estate returns filed during 1926, 283 reported net estates of $1 million or more.
That the Coolidge tax cuts left the rich untouched by the state. A millionaire’s coupon in 1900 was taxed at zero. In 1925 it was taxed at about 9.5%, and a large estate faced a graduated federal duty on everything above $50,000. That is a real burden arriving from a base of nothing in twenty-five years — even after Congress retroactively cut both taxes and refunded a quarter of a billion dollars of estate tax already collected.
That Fitzgerald was describing his own class. He earned $28,750 in 1923 and spent about $36,000, which made him a spectacular anomaly among American earners and nothing at all among the people at Gatsby’s parties. The distance the novel is actually about is the distance he lived at.
Bottom line
A million dollars in 1925 bought an income of about $44,500 a year, taxed at roughly 9.5%, equal to about thirty-four average American working lives — in a year when 207 people in the country reported a million-dollar income, when servants per family had already fallen by a third from 1900, and when, for two extraordinary autumns, you could walk into a collector’s office and read what your neighbours had paid.
A million dollars in 2026 throws off about $47,900 before tax — seven-tenths of one average worker’s pay, and a government yield standing in for 1925’s corporate one, which if anything flatters the modern figure — in a country with 23.6 million dollar millionaires and no disclosure of any kind.
The word held still while everything underneath it moved. In 1900 it meant seventy-six working lives and no federal tax at all. In 1925 it meant thirty-four and a tenth off the top. In 2026 it means less than one, and the disclosure regime that briefly let anyone check has been gone for a century.
The thing worth noticing about 1925 is not that the rich were richer — by any consumption measure they were poorer than a comfortable household today. It is that the machinery for knowing about them existed, worked, survived a Supreme Court test, and was dismantled by the same Congress that cut their taxes retroactively and mailed the estate tax back. Transparency and rates moved together, in the same direction, in the same statute. That is not a coincidence anyone in 1926 was trying very hard to hide.
Methods and sources. Bond yields are Macaulay’s adjusted index of high-grade American railroad bond yields (NBER, 1938, Appendix Table 10), as carried on FRED series M13019USM156NNBR; the 4.45% figure is the mean of the twelve 1925 monthly observations, not a published annual average, and it is Macaulay’s drift-adjusted index rather than raw market yields. Moody’s Aaa/Baa and long-term government yields are FRED AAA and M1333AUSM156NNBR, likewise averaged from monthly data. Earnings are Lebergott’s series D 723–724 in Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, read from the printed table; there is no official all-industry 1925 earnings statistic, since the government’s own series D 722 begins in 1929, and this piece says so rather than implying otherwise. The 1900 comparison figures are carried over from the previous instalment. The 47.3x decomposition (0.93 × 19.05 × 2.67) is my own arithmetic; the inflation term is BLS CPI-U as carried on FRED CPIAUCNS, 1925 annual average 17.5 against July 2026, and the real-wage term falls out of the other two. MeasuringWorth’s comparator runs only to 2025 and returns 18.4x, which is why both figures appear. Statutory text is the Revenue Act of 1926, ch. 27, 44 Stat. 9 — §§ 208, 209, 210, 211, 213(b), 216, 257(e), 286, 322, 324, 325 — and the Revenue Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 253; govinfo exposes only each chapter’s first page (1926, 1924), so the section text was read from the Library of Congress scan of Statutes at Large vol. 44 and cross-checked against the IRS’s archived 1925-income Form 1040 and its historical rate tables. The $4,216.87 tax computation is mine, built step by step from those sections; the earned-income credit is exactly $13.125, so the total comes to $4,216.875 and the last cent depends on the convention: $4,216.88 whether you round the total or truncate the credit, $4,216.87 if you round the credit up to $13.13 first. The piece uses $4,216.88. The estate tax refund figure is Treasury OTA Paper 80. Return counts and income-class distributions are Statistics of Income for 1925, read from the report’s own summary tables; the 283 millionaire estates are from its estate-tax table for resident-decedent returns filed during 1926, which is a filing-year count and not a count of 1925 deaths. The tax-exempt-bond explanation is Zelenak’s summary of a Wall Street Journal analysis of 10 November 1924 that I have not read in the original; it is the largest of four reasons he lists, not the only one. Published tax payments are as reported by the New York Times (24 October 1924) and Wall Street Journal, compiled and cited in Lawrence Zelenak’s “1924, 2021: Taxes of the Ultrarich, and Mark-to-Market Reforms” (Tax Notes Federal, 2021); the Rockefeller variants differ by about $20 and the Ford variants by as much as $777 across sources, and this piece uses the newspaper-cited versions. The publication windows are documented in ICPSR 36640. Servant ratios are Stigler’s Table 2 (NBER); no 1925 servant wage is quoted because Stigler’s wage chapter jumps from 1899 to 1939 and nothing in between is his. The Oheka construction cost and 126-servant count are from the property’s own marketing history and are flagged as such in the text. Gatsby’s dollar figures were verified by searching the Project Gutenberg text; Nick’s salary and the price of the shirts do not appear in the novel and are not invented here. Fitzgerald’s 1923 income and spending are from the Library of America’s presentation of his 1924 essay; a figure of $17,148 for his 1925 income circulates from a single secondary account of his tax returns and is therefore not used. Vehicle registrations are FHWA Table MV-200 and the $281 pickup price is The Henry Ford’s own catalogue record; the widely repeated $260 runabout price could not be traced to a Ford source and is omitted. Current figures are FRED DGS10 (2 September 2026) and CES0500000011 (July 2026), and the 23.6 million US dollar millionaires are from UBS’s Global Wealth Report 2026; the figure does not appear in UBS’s own press release, which reports only the 440,000 added during 2025, and was verified here through secondary reporting of the report rather than from the report itself. This draft was fact-checked line by line before publication.
Related reading: Time: Millionaires of 1900 · Taxes: How Wealth Is Structured and Preserved · What a Million Dollars Is Worth Today · Privacy: How the Wealthy Stay Invisible · Old Money and New Money: Different Styles of Wealth · Staff: Outsourcing Daily Life
