Where does your net worth really rank for your age?

What is the average net worth by age?

Median household net worth in the US runs from $39,000 under 35 to $409,400 at 65 and over, according to the Federal Reserve SCF 2022, and those medians are the numbers worth measuring yourself against, because the means for the same brackets run several times higher. Across all ages the mean sits at $1,059,470 against a median of $192,084. That $867,386 gap comes from concentration at the top, where 10% of US households hold 67.2% of all household wealth. Averaging your finances with a billionaire tells you nothing about your own position.

Coming in below the mean tells you almost nothing, since more than 60% of US households are below it as well. The median is the honest benchmark, and it is the one the calculator uses.

Source: Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances 2022. These are household figures rather than individual ones, so if you share money with a partner, add both sides of the ledger together before you compare. Earnings follow a different curve from wealth, and the salary by age calculator shows where income peaks and where it falls away.

UK average net worth by age

Median household wealth in Great Britain climbs from £15,200 in the 16 to 24 bracket to £502,500 at 65 to 74 before falling back, on figures from the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey Round 8, which covers 2020 to 2022 and is the fullest reading of household wealth Britain has. The overall median across all ages was £293,700, against a mean of £565,200. That gap has the same cause as the American one.

British wealth sits in two places above all others, property at roughly 40% of the total and private pensions at roughly 35%, which is why a homeowner with a defined-benefit entitlement and a renter on the same salary can be decades apart on this measure. That divide has widened across successive waves of the survey. Our savings calculator looks only at liquid financial wealth, and it tells a very different story.

Median wealth falls between the 65 to 74 bracket and the 75 and over bracket for two reasons pulling the same way. Retired households spend down savings and pension pots. And the make-up of the older group shifts as mortality removes households unevenly across the wealth range, so the survivors are not the same mix of people.

Are Millennials really worse off than Boomers?

Millennials are not poorer than Boomers were at the same age, at least on the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts, which put US Millennials born 1981 to 1996 at a median net worth of roughly $135,300 when measured at 35 to 44 in 2022, against roughly $100,840 for Baby Boomers at that age once inflation is stripped out. That leaves Millennials about 34% ahead in real terms, which is the reverse of the story most people have absorbed.

Generation X, born 1965 to 1980, came off worst. They reached their peak wealth-building years in the late 1990s and early 2000s and built housing equity through the boom, then took the 2008 crash at the exact point in the lifecycle where it does the most damage. Plenty lost the equity, the retirement savings, or both.

Asset prices after 2020 did most of the work for whoever already owned something. The Center for American Progress found in 2024 that the wealth of younger Americans grew 101% between 2019 and 2023, on pandemic-era saving, rising equity markets and house prices. That headline hides a split inside the cohort, because a young homeowner holding index funds and a young renter holding neither moved in opposite directions over the same four years.

Where the Millennial disadvantage does show clearly is housing. Homeownership at 30 to 34 runs materially lower for Millennials than it did for Boomers at that age, and in expensive cities the gap is wide. Since a house has been the main route to middle-class wealth in both countries for decades, a delayed first purchase compounds into a permanent difference.

How does net worth grow over a lifetime?

The pattern Modigliani and Brumberg set out in 1954 still fits, with net worth low or negative through the 20s while student debt lands before earnings do, climbing through the 30s and 40s as mortgages are paid down and pensions build, peaking just before retirement in the mid-60s, then falling away as households spend what they saved. That last phase is why the oldest bracket in the tables above holds less than the one before it.

Student debt has grown enough to push the starting point further below zero, and house price appreciation added a windfall the original model never imagined. The move from defined-benefit to defined-contribution pensions in both countries then handed investment risk to individuals, which widened the spread of outcomes in the last decade of a working life.

The steadiest finding in both countries is that the gap inside an age group dwarfs the gap between age groups. In the US 45 to 54 bracket the 90th percentile is $1,935,000 and the median is $247,200, a spread far wider than the distance between any two age medians in the table. What decides where you land inside your own bracket is career path, inheritance, when you happened to buy a house, and what you did with the money in between. Workers of 50 and over can pay into retirement accounts above the standard IRS limits, which speeds up the last stretch before peak wealth. At 73 Required Minimum Distributions begin and force annual withdrawals from traditional 401(k) and IRA accounts, part of why the 75 and over median drops back. Full percentile tables by age sit on the net worth statistics page.

How is net worth calculated?

Net worth is total assets minus total liabilities, where assets cover checking and savings accounts, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, 401(k) and IRA balances, home equity, other real estate, vehicles and any business stake, and liabilities cover mortgages, home equity loans, vehicle loans, student loans and credit card balances. The SCF leaves out Social Security, Medicare and the promise inside a defined-benefit plan. That is a real omission, because those entitlements are worth a great deal to older households, and dropping them pushes the older medians down. For most American households the house is the largest asset and the mortgage is the largest debt. Running your own number against the SCF percentiles once a year is a cheap way to see whether anything is moving.

How to grow your net worth

Households that build wealth fastest do the same few things at every income level, starting with the tax-advantaged accounts, where the 2025 IRS limits allow $23,500 into a 401(k) and $7,000 into an IRA, plus catch-up contributions of $7,500 from age 50 and $11,250 for those aged 60 to 63 under SECURE 2.0. Money compounding inside a shelter beats the same money in a taxable account, and the difference widens every year. Consumer debt at 20%+ goes next, because a guaranteed loss at that rate is one no portfolio reliably beats. Mortgage payments do the quiet work, turning a monthly cost into an asset you own. The Schwab Modern Wealth Survey 2025 found Americans put the figure they would need to feel financially comfortable at about $839,000, against an actual US median at peak wealth age of $409,900 for 65 to 74.

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