$215,900
median family net worth — half of families own more, half own less (Fed SCF 2025)
The Shape of American Wealth
Two curves describe almost everything about money in America: how income spreads out, and how wealth spreads out even further. Drag the slider to any percentile and see what a family there actually owns — and where their income comes from.
Source: Federal Reserve 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances (released Oct 9, 2026) · Page published October 2026
Explore the distribution
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.
Landmarks on the curve
A few points worth knowing before you drag the slider.
$82,200
median family income, before tax (Fed SCF 2025)
$812,492
net worth at the 75th percentile — the entry ticket to the top quarter
$16,463,320
net worth at the 99th percentile — the entry ticket to the top 1%
Why the curve leans so hard right
Both curves are lognormal-like: most families cluster near the middle while a long right tail stretches toward the ultra-wealthy. Wealth is far more skewed than income — the top 1%'s entry ticket ($16.46M) is 76 times the median family's net worth ($215,900), while the top-1% income line ($731,492, SmartAsset/IRS) is only about 9 times the median family income ($82,200). That's why the net-worth bell looks flatter and wider than the income bell.
What changes as you move right
Drag the slider and watch the pie. At the bottom, wealth is the house — the primary residence is nearly three-quarters of assets for the bottom quarter. By the top 10%, the house is under 7% and the pie is dominated by business equity (26%) and stocks (21%). Income shifts too: wages fall from ~77% of income in the second quartile to 42% at the top, while capital gains and business income take over. This is the same story the wealth-gap section tells from the other direction. For the liability side of the balance sheet, see Debt & financial stress.
How this page is built
Net-worth curve. Uses all 99 percentile cutoffs computed by DQYDJ from the 2025 SCF public microdata (4,360 families, nominal dollars). The curve is the empirical density implied by those cutoffs — lightly smoothed with a 5-percentile moving average to remove cutoff-estimation noise — plotted on a logarithmic dollar axis. Percentiles 1–8 have zero or negative net worth and are gathered at the axis floor; the chart notes this rather than hiding it.
Income curve. A lognormal distribution fitted to the SCF 2025 income medians by percentile group (median $82,200; σ ≈ 0.96). It is a smoothed model, not exact percentiles — the shape is right, individual points are approximate.
The pies. The Fed publishes mean asset holdings and income sources for five wealth bands (bottom 25%, 25–50%, 50–75%, 75–90%, top 10%). The pie at your slider position linearly interpolates between the two nearest bands. Dollar amounts on the asset pie multiply each share by the net worth at your percentile — a stylized illustration, since any single family differs from its band's average.
What net worth includes. Assets minus debts: home equity, vehicles, real estate, businesses, financial assets including retirement accounts — minus mortgages and other debt. It excludes the capitalized value of Social Security and defined-benefit pensions, which is why retirees can look poorer here than they feel.
Full sourcing: methodology · Fed bulletin (PDF) · SCF data hub