Average Net Worth by Age — and Where Millionaires Sit on the Curve
The Million Dollar Question: According to the Federal Reserve’s newest Survey of Consumer Finances, at which age bracket does the median American household’s net worth first cross $1 million?
A) 45–54 B) 55–64 C) 75 or older D) None of them — the median never gets there
Read on for the answer.
The Federal Reserve just published its newest household balance-sheet survey, and it reshuffled something that hadn’t moved in a while: the richest age group in America. Here’s exactly where every age bracket actually stands — on the mean, on the median, and on the percentile ladder where “millionaire” status actually lives.
What the Fed is actually measuring
Every three years, the Federal Reserve surveys a few thousand American families in detail about everything they own and owe, then publishes the results as the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) — the most rigorous household wealth dataset in the country, and the one nearly every “average net worth by age” article on the internet is quietly built from, whether it says so or not. The newest edition, released October 9, 2026, covers 2025 and compares it to the prior survey from 2022.
A few definitions matter before the numbers do. “Net worth” here means total assets (homes, retirement accounts, business equity, vehicles, cash, investments) minus total liabilities (mortgages, student loans, credit cards, other debt) — not income, and not cash in a checking account. “Family” is the Fed’s term for an economic household, grouped by the age of a reference person into six brackets: under 35, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65–74, and 75 or older. And every figure in this piece is already adjusted for inflation into 2025 dollars, so the 2022-to-2025 comparisons below are real changes, not just rising prices.
The 2025 numbers, bracket by bracket
Here’s the headline table, straight from the Fed’s bulletin:
| Age bracket | Median 2022 | Median 2025 | Change | Mean 2022 | Mean 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 35 | $42,700 | $33,000 | −23% | $200,800 | $135,400 | −33% |
| 35–44 | $148,400 | $155,600 | +5% | $601,500 | $681,900 | +13% |
| 45–54 | $270,600 | $253,700 | −6% | $1,067,900 | $1,244,500 | +17% |
| 55–64 | $398,900 | $411,900 | +3% | $1,714,700 | $1,878,000 | +10% |
| 65–74 | $448,600 | $431,300 | −4% | $1,963,900 | $1,897,600 | −3% |
| 75 or older | $367,300 | $504,900 | +37% | $1,777,400 | $1,962,200 | +10% |
The move that made news: families 75 and older now hold the highest median and highest mean net worth of any age bracket, overtaking the 65–74 group for the first time in the survey’s recent history. Meanwhile, families under 35 are the only bracket to see net worth fall in both measures — median down 23%, mean down a steep 33%. Across all families regardless of age, median net worth rose a modest 2%, from $211,100 to $215,900, while the mean rose 7%, from $1,164,100 to $1,241,500, the Fed’s bulletin reports.
It’s worth sitting with how wide these bands are even within a single bracket. A 68-year-old with $400,000 in a 401(k) and a paid-off house, and a 68-year-old running a profitable small business worth $8 million, are both “65–74.” The table above describes the bracket; it doesn’t describe any individual family in it.
Why the mean and the median disagree more as you age
Look at the gap between mean and median in that table and a pattern jumps out: it widens with age. At under-35, mean ($135,400) is about 4 times median ($33,000). By 75-plus, mean ($1,962,200) is almost 4 times median ($504,900) too — but both numbers are vastly larger, which tells you the dollar gap between mean and median keeps growing even as the ratio holds roughly steady.
The reason is concentration. Within any age bracket, a small share of families — business owners, long-term equity holders, people who inherited — hold a disproportionate share of that bracket’s total wealth. The mean (total divided by number of families) gets pulled hard toward those outliers. The median (the family exactly in the middle) doesn’t move nearly as much, because it only cares about who’s in the 50th-percentile position, not how rich the top of the bracket is. The Associated Press’s coverage of the release makes the same point about the 75-plus group specifically: “the gap between the average and the median reflects wealthier households pulling the average up.” That’s true of every bracket, just more visibly at the top of the age range, where decades of compounding have had the most time to separate the median household from the wealthiest ones nearby.
Practically: if you’re comparing your own net worth to “the average for my age,” you’re comparing yourself to a number that a relatively small number of very wealthy families in your bracket are dragging upward. The median is the more honest benchmark for “what does a typical person my age actually have” — and as the next section shows, even the median undersells how far away $1 million really is.
Where millionaires actually sit on the curve, by age
The Fed’s own six-bracket table gives median and mean, but not the percentile detail needed to answer the question this post is named for: at what age, and at what percentile, does net worth actually cross $1 million?
For that, an independent analysis of the SCF’s underlying microdata — not an official Fed publication, but a widely cited breakdown built directly from the same survey, segmented into finer five-year bands — fills in the gap:
| Age bracket | 25th pct. | Median | 75th pct. | 90th pct. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25–29 | $2,928 | $35,418 | $130,060 | $288,626 |
| 30–34 | $7,528 | $63,826 | $251,478 | $435,950 |
| 35–39 | $11,302 | $125,274 | $416,560 | $1,141,662 |
| 40–44 | $31,130 | $184,220 | $550,194 | $1,422,940 |
| 45–49 | $51,248 | $219,667 | $774,120 | $2,043,308 |
| 50–54 | $58,464 | $284,442 | $1,035,442 | $3,263,372 |
| 55–59 | $35,530 | $264,584 | $1,305,700 | $3,245,528 |
| 60–64 | $107,680 | $527,752 | $1,494,360 | $3,815,220 |
| 65–69 | $112,317 | $437,162 | $1,282,012 | $3,454,820 |
| 70–74 | $118,850 | $423,788 | $1,359,674 | $3,952,060 |
| 75–79 | $136,550 | $442,326 | $1,354,500 | $4,173,760 |
| 80+ | $197,222 | $566,490 | $1,522,310 | $4,188,700 |
Read it as a curve, not a lookup table, and the pattern is clear: $1 million first shows up at the 90th percentile in the late 30s, moves down to roughly the 75th percentile by the early 50s, and — this is the headline fact — never shows up at the median, at any single age bracket shown here, or in the Fed’s own official six-bracket table. The highest median in this entire finer breakdown is $566,490 (ages 80+); the highest in the Fed’s own official table is $504,900 (75-plus, aggregating 75–79 and 80+ into one bracket). Both are a long way short of seven figures — and so is every other bracket in between.
That reframes “millionaire” as less of an age milestone and more of a percentile milestone — a position most people, at most ages, simply aren’t near, regardless of how old they get. It also explains why “the average millionaire is in their 60s” headlines coexist so comfortably with “most 60-somethings aren’t millionaires” being equally true: both describe the same lopsided distribution from different ends.
What moved between 2022 and 2025, and why
The Fed’s bulletin doesn’t just report the numbers — it offers an explanation for the two biggest moves. The 75-and-older group’s jump is attributed largely to growth in retirement-account values over the three-year window, a group with the most accumulated savings available to benefit from market gains. The under-35 group’s decline, meanwhile, is attributed mainly to the unwinding of business-equity gains that had inflated their 2022 numbers in the first place — a reminder that the 2019–2022 survey window captured an unusually hot period for small-business valuations and pandemic-era asset prices that have since cooled.
Zoom out further and the gap between the top and bottom of the wealth distribution kept widening in the same period: the AP reports that the median net worth of the richest 10% of families rose 31%, to $3.6 million, between 2022 and 2025, and that the top 0.1% of families have more than doubled their total wealth since 2020. None of this is specific to any one age bracket — it’s a story about wealth concentration generally, which happens to show up most visibly at the older end of the age distribution because that’s where the most total wealth sits.
The bigger-picture count: across all ages, there are now roughly 23.6 million dollar-millionaire households in the United States, according to UBS’s 2026 Global Wealth Report — with the U.S. alone adding more than 440,000 new millionaires in 2025, close to half of all the new millionaires created worldwide that year. That’s the stock of people who’ve crossed the line this post is measuring distance to.
Hidden costs and tradeoffs: the debt side of the ledger
Net worth gains are not the whole story, and they’re not evenly distributed with financial stability. The same 2025 survey found that nearly 20% of families reported being late on a loan payment in the prior year, up sharply from 12.2% in 2022, and that 8.6% of families were spending 40% or more of their income on debt payments — the highest share in at least 12 years, per the AP’s reporting on the release. Rising net worth figures at the top of the distribution and rising debt stress in the middle and bottom of it are happening in the same three-year window, in the same dataset. A family’s net worth can be climbing on paper — home equity up, a 401(k) up — while that same family is also later on payments than it used to be, because net worth doesn’t measure cash flow, and a lot of the wealth sitting in these numbers (home equity, retirement accounts) isn’t something you can spend on this month’s bills without selling or borrowing against it.
There’s also a compositional cost hiding inside every one of these age brackets: survivorship. The 75-plus bracket’s rising median partly reflects who’s still being surveyed at that age — wealthier households tend to live longer and remain in better financial shape to answer a detailed Fed survey — which the bulletin doesn’t claim to fully control for. None of the brackets above are a random draw of “everyone born in that decade”; they’re a snapshot of who’s still there.
What people get wrong
Treating the mean as a realistic target. “Average net worth by age” headlines almost always report the mean, because it’s the bigger, more clickable number. As shown above, the mean in every bracket is dragged well above what a typical family in that bracket actually has — sometimes by a factor of three or four. The median is the honest number; the mean is closer to a measure of how rich the richest families in that bracket are.
Confusing income with net worth. A $400,000-a-year earner in their mid-30s can have a lower net worth than a $90,000-a-year earner the same age who’s owned a house for a decade — income pays the bills today, net worth is what’s actually accumulated. This is the exact gap this site’s HENRY piece is built around: high earners, not rich yet, precisely because income and net worth track different things on different timelines.
Assuming net worth means cash on hand. Most of the net worth in these tables is home equity and retirement accounts — not money sitting in a checking account. As covered in this site’s piece on liquidity, a family can be a net-worth millionaire and still be cash-poor month to month, because a huge share of “millionaire” net worth is, by construction, not liquid.
Treating “becoming a millionaire” as an age-linked inevitability. The data above says the opposite: it’s a percentile position, not a stop on a timeline. At every single age bracket in both the Fed’s official table and the finer independent breakdown, the median family — the actual middle of the pack — never reaches $1 million. Getting there, at any age, means landing well above the middle of your cohort, not just waiting long enough.
Bottom line
The Million Dollar Question, answered: D. The median American household’s net worth never crosses $1 million, at any age bracket, in either the 2022 or the 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances. The highest median of any bracket is $504,900 (75-plus, officially) — not even halfway to seven figures. “Millionaire by retirement” isn’t what the Fed’s own numbers show happening to the typical household; a comfortable six-figure net worth, not a seven-figure one, is what “typical” actually looks like at every age, including the oldest. Where $1 million does show up is further out on the curve: around the 90th percentile by the late 30s, and closer to the 75th percentile by the early 50s. Millionaire status, in other words, is less a milestone you age into than a position on the curve most people, at most ages, aren’t standing on.
Related reading: Wealth Levels: Life at $1M, $10M, $100M, and $1B · The Moving Target: Why $1 Million Doesn’t Mean What It Used To · HENRY: $500K and Still Paycheck-to-Paycheck · Liquidity: How Much Cash the Wealthy Actually Keep · Multiple Streams of Income: The Myth, the Math, and What Wealthy Households Actually Do
Methods and sources. All official median and mean net-worth-by-age figures, the all-family median/mean, and the Fed’s own explanation for the under-35 decline and the 75-plus gain are from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances bulletin, “Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2022 to 2025”, released October 9, 2026 — the primary source for every dollar figure in the six-bracket table. The finer five-year-bracket percentile table (25th/median/75th/90th) is an independent analysis of the same SCF microdata by DQYDJ, clearly distinguished in the text from the Fed’s own official bracket table; it is supplementary detail, not an official Federal Reserve product. Debt-stress figures (late-payment rate, 40%+ debt-to-income share), the richest-10%-of-families figure, and the top-0.1% figure are from the Associated Press’s reporting on the release via NBC4 Washington. The total U.S. dollar-millionaire count and new-millionaires-in-2025 figures are from UBS’s 2026 Global Wealth Report, via 401(k) Specialist magazine’s reporting on the figures. This is not financial advice; net worth is a household-level statistic that varies enormously by individual circumstance, and anyone making a financial decision based on these figures should consult a licensed financial advisor. See Editorial Standards.
