60M
adults worldwide hold over $1M — 1.6% of sampled adults (UBS, end-2024)
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How much money does it take to be rich?
Two different finish lines. The median US family holds $215,900 in net worth and earns $83,730 a year. Where do you land?
Find my percentile →From Fortune & Folly
Net-worth percentile calculator estimate
Enter your household net worth and see where it lands against verified thresholds. Results are rough estimates — brackets sit between published data points.
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Compared against US thresholds from the 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances.
Compared against World Inequality Report 2021 thresholds in PPP euros — enter your net worth as a raw number in your own currency (no conversion applied). Example: €500,000 → enter 500000.
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How to read your result — brackets, median vs. mean, the global tab — and the complete picture with your age and income →
The shape of American wealth
Net-worth curve: empirical percentiles 1–99 from DQYDJ's analysis of 2025 SCF microdata. Income curve: lognormal fit to SCF 2025 income percentiles. Height shows the concentration of families (per equal width on the log scale) — the peak is where families are most densely packed. Asset and income mixes: mean holdings by wealth group from the Fed's SCF historic tables, interpolated between groups. About 8% of families have zero or negative net worth — they sit at the curve's left edge.
Deep dive: the full distribution explorer, with methodology →
The monthly squeeze, 1989–2025
Debt payments as a share of family income — the aggregate across all families. Switch views to see who feels it most.
Source: Fed SCF historic tables, Table 18 (aggregate payment-to-income ratios). Every group jumped between 2022 and 2025; the 2010 peak marks the Great Recession's aftermath. The top income decile consistently pays the smallest share of its income on debt.
Top-1% net worth by year
The minimum household net worth to enter the top 1%, in nominal dollars — DQYDJ analysis of Fed SCF microdata.
Thresholds: Fed SCF 2025 · Page updated October 2026
Long-run context: average top-1% net worth, 1962–2010 (2010 dollars)
A different measure — the mean (average) net worth of the top 1%, inflation-adjusted to 2010 dollars (Edward Wolff series). Kept for long-run context only; never compare it directly with the entry-threshold chart above.
Source: Edward Wolff (NBER w18559)
What "top 1%" actually measures
The chart above shows the minimum net worth needed to enter the top 1% — the poorest household in the club, not the average member. That line rose from $7.88 million in 2013 to $16.46 million in 2025, in nominal dollars. Part of that climb is real wealth growth; part is inflation lifting every nominal figure. The two series on this page exist because people constantly confuse them: the mean top-1% net worth (the average member's fortune) is far higher than the entry threshold, and mixing the two produces nonsense comparisons.
The Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances runs every three years, so these thresholds move in steps, not smoothly — the next update (2025 survey data, expected late 2026) will reset the line again. How we compute these figures →
Where America's wealth actually sits
The entry threshold above is the price of admission to the top 1%. This is the other half of the picture: how all US household wealth is divided — who owns what share of the whole pie.
Source: Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts · 2026:Q2 · Page updated October 2026
Source: Federal Reserve Board, Distributional Financial Accounts — quarterly shares of total household net worth by wealth percentile. Squares are rounded to whole percents; the legend carries the exact figures.
The top 10% of households owns 68.9% of the pie. The bottom half of the country — half of all households — owns 2.3%.
Source: Federal Reserve Board, Distributional Financial Accounts, quarterly. Built from the Survey of Consumer Finances plus the Financial Accounts of the United States.
Shares vs. thresholds: two different questions
The $16.46 million figure in the section above is the minimum net worth needed to enter the top 1% — the poorest household in the club. This section measures something different: what fraction of all US household wealth each group owns. A rising entry threshold means the door got more expensive; a rising top-1% share means the club owns more of the building. Both are rising.
The long view: in 1989, the top 1% owned 22.8% of US household wealth. By mid-2026 that was 32.5% — nearly a third, up by more than two-fifths. Over the same span the middle 40% slipped from 35.7% to 28.8%, and the bottom half fell from 3.5% to 2.3%. The next 9% held roughly steady, drifting from 38.0% to 36.4%.
One more number worth knowing: inside that top 1%, the top 0.1% alone owns 15.0% of all household wealth — nearly half of the top 1%'s share, and more than six times the entire bottom half combined.
Why this doesn't match the 34.78% in our big-picture section
Sharp-eyed readers will notice the big-picture stat cards cite 34.78% for the top 1% (World Inequality Database, 2024) while this chart shows 32.5% (Fed DFA, 2026:Q2). Both are honest; they measure differently. The Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts start from its Survey of Consumer Finances and the national Financial Accounts. The World Inequality Database builds Distributional National Accounts with heavier adjustments aimed at capturing wealth at the very top, which household surveys tend to miss. Different methods, different vintages, slightly different answers — which is why every figure on this site carries its source. How we compute these figures →
Billionaire snapshot
Forbes 2026 annual list — published March 2026
| Rank | Name | Net worth |
|---|
Source: Forbes via BusinessWire. A March 2026 snapshot — fortunes change constantly; see the live Forbes list and our methodology for the refresh process.
Why a snapshot, not a live list
The 2026 Forbes list counted 3,428 billionaires holding a combined $20.1 trillion — but that photograph was taken in March, and fortunes this large move with the market every trading day. Elon Musk's $839 billion headline figure can swing tens of billions in a week on Tesla's share price alone. A live number would be outdated by the time you read it, so we publish the audited annual snapshot and link Forbes' real-time tracker for the current score. Treat billionaire rankings as weather, not climate: fun to check, useless for planning.
What counts as rich where you live
The minimum income to enter the top 1% in each US state, against the national median household income of $83,730 (Census, real 2024 dollars). State data: SmartAsset 2025 study of IRS 2022 individual-tax-filer data, adjusted to May 2025 dollars.
Source vintage: SmartAsset 2025 (IRS 2022) · Page updated September 2026
Click a column header to sort the table.
| State | Top-1% income floor ▼ | × median income |
|---|
National average: $731,492. Washington, D.C. is not included in the SmartAsset table. City-level thresholds are not published from a current citable source, so this table covers states only.
Why "rich" costs more in Connecticut than Mississippi
The top-1% income floor ranges from $1,056,996 in Connecticut to $416,310 in West Virginia — a 2.5× spread. Three forces drive it: industry mix (finance in Connecticut, energy in Texas, tech in California concentrate high earners), cost of living (high salaries partly compensate for expensive housing), and population (small states' thresholds swing on a handful of outliers). The national $731,492 average is useful shorthand, but your state's number is the one that describes your neighbors.
One more distinction that trips people up: this table is income, not wealth. A retired couple in Mississippi living off a $3 million portfolio can be top-1% by net worth while earning a middle-class income — and a young surgeon in Manhattan can clear the income bar while holding negative net worth from student loans. Income tells you who earns the most this year; net worth tells you who kept it. Check the other finish line →
The big picture
Sources: UBS Global Wealth Report 2025 · World Inequality Database 2024 · Fed SCF 2025 · Page updated October 2026
$226.47T
held by those millionaires — 48.1% of sampled global wealth (UBS, end-2024)
+684,000
new millionaires in 2024 alone, +1.2% (UBS)
34.78%
of US household wealth sits with the top 1% (WID, 2024)
36.44%
of global household wealth sits with the top 1% (WID, 2024)
$215,900
median US family net worth vs $1,241,500 mean — the gap that shows how skewed wealth is (Fed SCF 2025)
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Frequently Asked Questions
How much money does it take to be rich?
There are two finish lines. By net worth, it takes $16,463,320 to enter the top 1% of US households (Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, 2025). By income, it takes $731,492 a year (SmartAsset 2025 analysis of IRS 2022 data). For context, the median US family holds $215,900 in net worth and earns $83,730 a year.
What counts as net worth?
Net worth is assets minus liabilities. It includes home equity (home value minus mortgage), retirement accounts, investments, savings, and other property — minus mortgages, credit-card balances, student loans, and other debts. It excludes future earnings and human capital.
Does net worth include your house?
Yes. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances counts home equity — your home's value minus what you owe on the mortgage — so all US net-worth figures on WealthIndex include it.
What income puts you in the top 1%?
Nationally, $731,492 a year puts a household in the top 1% (SmartAsset 2025 study of IRS 2022 tax-filer data). The threshold varies by state — it is highest in states like Connecticut and Massachusetts and lowest in states like Mississippi and West Virginia.
What's the difference between income and net-worth percentiles?
Income is a flow — what a household earns in a year. Net worth is a stock — what it owns minus what it owes. The two don't move together: $731,492 a year puts a household in the top 1% for income, while the top-1% net-worth line is $16,463,320. A high earner who spends everything can sit in a high income bracket with a below-median net worth.
Do wealth percentiles change with age?
A lot. The median household net worth for Americans under 35 is $33,000; it climbs to $253,700 for ages 45–54 and keeps rising to $504,900 past age 75 (Fed SCF 2025). Use the Complete the picture calculator to see your numbers against your own age group.
How do US figures compare globally?
The US is wealthy by world standards: the global top-1% net-worth threshold is about €807,300 in purchasing-power terms (World Inequality Report 2022) — roughly one-seventeenth of the US top-1% line — and average global adult wealth is about €72,900. Try the Global tab on the calculator to see where you'd land worldwide.
How often is this data updated?
It depends on the source. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances runs every three years (2025 is the latest published, released October 2026); the Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts — our wealth-share figures — update quarterly; the Forbes billionaire list refreshes each March/April; state income figures come from the SmartAsset 2025 study of IRS 2022 data; and Fortune & Folly publishes a new story every day. Each section notes its source vintage.