US Net Worth Percentile by Age

How the percentile is worked out

The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances is the definitive picture of American household wealth, and the 2022 edition is the most recent one published. The Fed's own bulletin reports the median and mean net worth for six age bands, and the SCF public microdata lets analysts compute finer percentile breakpoints. This tool places your net worth between the nearest two published breakpoints for your age bracket (the 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th and 99th percentiles) and interpolates linearly between them. That is an approximation, and we would rather tell you that than pretend to single-percentile precision the survey cannot support.

One honesty note the headline writers usually skip: always compare yourself to the median, not the average. The average net worth of an American household in 2022 was about $1,063,700, while the median was $192,900. That gap is not a typo. A small number of very wealthy households drag the average up so far that it describes almost nobody. The median is the actual middle household, which is why this tool ranks you against percentiles rather than averages.

Two caveats worth holding onto. First, the SCF measures households, not individuals, so a couple's combined finances count as one unit; if you are single and comparing against two-income households, you are playing on a slightly tilted field. Second, the data was collected in 2022 with a tail of interviews in early 2023, so markets and house prices have moved since. The shape of the distribution changes slowly, but the dollar figures drift.