Money statistics: what the data actually shows

What is the average net worth by age?

The median American household is worth $192,900, and the mean is $1,063,700. Both come from the same Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances for 2022, and the gap between them is wealth piling up at the top. The Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts put 67.9% of all household wealth with the richest 10% of households in the first quarter of 2026, and that drags the mean up to a figure that describes almost nobody. If you want to know where you stand, use the median. The mean tells you about the country's rich, not about your neighbours.

Wealth builds slowly through the working years and peaks in the decade before retirement. Half of households under 35 are worth less than $39,000; by 55 to 64 the median is $364,500. The spread inside each age band is even wider than the spread between them, and a 55 to 64 year old at the 90th percentile holds $2,960,900, about eight times the median for the same age. Our net worth by age calculator places your own figure in your age band, and the income class calculator does the same for what comes in each month.

What is the average salary by age?

Pay peaks later than most people think and falls sooner. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2025 annual averages for full-time workers show men's median pay topping out at 45 to 54 and women's a decade earlier, at 35 to 44, before both slide through the late fifties, partly because higher earners retire early and partly because people cut their hours. In the UK, ONS ASHE 2025 puts the full-time peak at 40 to 49 for both men and women, though its age bands don't line up with the American ones, so the table shows each UK figure with its own band.

The gap between men's and women's pay isn't fixed; it opens with age. At 16 to 24, American women working full time earn about 90% of the male median, and by 45 to 54 that has fallen to around 79.5%, with motherhood and years spent caring for other people doing most of the damage. The salary age curve calculator shows where your pay sits against people of your own age and sex.

How much savings should I have by age?

Far less than the guidelines say you should. Fidelity's rule of one year's salary saved by 30 is a target, and a fair one, but it describes almost nobody: the Federal Reserve's SCF 2022 puts the median household under 35 at $5,400 in liquid savings (current, savings and money market accounts), and those with a retirement account hold a median $18,880 in it. The survey keeps the two apart, and so should you when you compare yourself, because most of the benchmarks quietly lump them together.

The Fed's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking found in its 2025 round that 37% of adults wouldn't cover a $400 emergency expense entirely with cash or its equivalent, and 12% couldn't pay it at all. Hold that next to the "three to six months of expenses" advice and you can see how far the population sits from the finance industry's picture of normal. People do save, just more slowly than the guidelines imply. The average savings by age calculator compares your balance with households your age rather than with a target.

What is the average debt by age?

American households owed $18.8 trillion between them in the second quarter of 2026, according to the New York Fed's Household Debt and Credit Report. Among households with any debt, the median balance is highest at 35 to 44, at $140,400, and nearly all of that is the house: 53% of households in that bracket have debt secured by their home, with a median balance of $190,000. Student loans weigh most on younger borrowers, and families with education debt carry a mean balance of $46,600. Households that carry a credit card balance owe a mean of $6,100 on it.

What the debt is for matters as much as how big it is. A mortgage is secured against something that usually rises in value and charges a lowish rate; a credit card at 20 to 25% APR compounds against you every month. Median debt falls steadily after 54 as mortgages get paid down and student loans clear. The average debt by age calculator gives your total as a percentile for your age, and the credit card debt calculator looks at the expensive part on its own.

What is a good credit score for my age?

It depends how old you are, and not because older people pay their bills more reliably. The national average FICO score was 713 at the end of 2025, but length of credit history is worth 15% of the calculation, so a 22-year-old with a perfect record can't reach the score a 60-year-old with the same record holds. Experian's 2025 figures have Gen Z (18 to 28) averaging 678 and Baby Boomers (61 to 79) averaging 747. A score that's below average for the country can be well above average for your generation.

The tiers are what lenders actually look at. Good, 670 to 739, gets you most standard loans. Very Good, 740 to 799, gets you better rates on a mortgage or a car. Exceptional, 800 and above, is the top 22.8% of scorers and usually gets the best rate going. The credit score calculator turns your score into a percentile for your own generation.

How much does the average person spend on rent?

More than the rule says they should. Housing and Urban Development calls a household rent-burdened when it spends more than 30% of gross income on housing, a line Congress drew in 1981 when it raised the 25% cap the Brooke Amendment of 1969 had put on public housing rents, and it hasn't moved since. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies counted 22.4 million American renter households over that line in 2022, and about 12 million of them past 50%, which is where the word "severe" gets attached.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition worked out in its 2026 Out of Reach report that a full-time worker needs $34.73 an hour, about $72,200 a year, to afford a modest two-bedroom at the national average fair market rent, and in most big cities that's well above what people earn in their first jobs. London is worse. ONS figures for the financial year ending March 2024 show a private renter on London's median household income would spend 41.6% of it on an average rent, against 36.3% across England. The rent burden calculator shows how far over or under the 30% line you are.

Are Millennials worse off than Boomers?

On wealth, no, which surprises almost everyone. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances puts the median household headed by a 35 to 44 year old at about $135,300 in 2022, and most of those heads were Millennials (born 1981 to 1996). In 1995, when that age bracket was all Baby Boomers, its median was about $100,840 in 2022 dollars. By that measure Millennials are roughly 34% wealthier at the same point in life than their parents were.

The generation the comparison is unkind to is Generation X, born 1965 to 1980, whose best wealth-building years ran straight into the 2008 crash; in 2010 the median for 35 to 44 year olds had fallen to about $57,860. After 2020, anyone young who already owned assets did very well: the Center for American Progress found Millennials' inflation-adjusted wealth grew 101% from the end of 2019 to the end of 2023 on pandemic savings, a rising stock market and house prices. Where Millennials really are behind is owning a home. Their ownership rate at 30 to 34 is well below the Boomers' at the same age, and in both the US and the UK the house is how ordinary families have built wealth. The net worth by age calculator lets you compare yourself with your own generation at the same age.

How much does the average commute cost?

More than the fare. The average American one-way commute is 27.2 minutes (Census ACS 2024), which over a 40-year career at 260 working days a year comes to about 9,428 hours, or 1.61 waking years, spent getting to and from work. Then there's the money. The IRS standard mileage rate, which is meant to cover what a car costs to own and run, is 76 cents a mile from July 2026, so a 10-mile each-way commute costs around $3,952 a year before you've counted a minute of your time.

Transport economists price commute time at 25 to 50% of your net hourly wage, and once you add that to the fares, a 45-minute commute on median US earnings usually costs more than 10% of take-home pay. Stutzer and Frey, writing in the Scandinavian Journal of Economics in 2008, found that people with longer commutes report lower life satisfaction and aren't paid back for it through higher wages or cheaper housing. The cost of commute calculator adds up yours.

What income puts you in the top 10%?

About $251,000 in household income. The Census Bureau's Current Population Survey for 2024 puts the median household at $83,730, so the top 10% starts at three times the middle. Above $335,700 you're in the top 5%, and Census doesn't publish a cut-off for the top 1%. Percentiles like these tell you more than "middle class" ever will, because everyone from a nurse to a surgeon believes the label applies to them.

Pew draws its upper-income line at more than twice the national median, adjusted for household size, and in 2023 that line put 19% of American adults in upper-income households. In 2024, 42.8% of households brought in $100,000 or more, so six figures no longer means what it did. The income class calculator gives you your tier and percentile, and the salary age curve calculator compares your pay with people your own age.

How does UK wealth compare to US wealth?

Britain's median household is worth £293,700 and its mean household about £502,700, according to Round 8 of the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey covering 2020 to 2022, and the same concentration at the top explains the gap as in the US. Where British wealth differs is in what it's made of: about 40% is property and about 35% is private pensions, both hard to spend. A homeowner with a defined-benefit pension looks enormously richer on paper than a renter earning the same salary at the same age, even if their monthly lives look identical.

Putting the two countries side by side is harder than it looks. Neither survey counts US Social Security or NHS entitlements, both of which are worth a great deal to the households that have them. The UK's Gini coefficient for wealth is 0.59, which is American-scale inequality. Housing is the sharpest difference: British house price growth has been concentrated in London and the South East, so where you live splits British wealth more than it does in the US. Our net worth by age calculator takes either country's figures.