Net Worth by Age: Why Comparison Charts Mislead

Net worth by age is easy to look up and hard to compare fairly. In the 2025 round of the US Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median family headed by someone under 35 had a net worth of about US$33,000, and the median rose with age to about US$505,000 for families headed by someone 75 or older.¹ Each median marks the middle family of its age group and describes those families only; it sets no target for yours.

Any chart of wealth by age rests on a survey like that one, and each survey measures something specific: families or households, with or without pensions, in one year’s money. Read a chart without those labels and it can make an ordinary position look far behind, which helps nobody who is trying to build wealth steadily over time. Five questions settle whether a chart is a fair yardstick: mean or median, households or individuals, which assets count, which survey year and money, and whether a snapshot of different families is being read as one family’s path.

What is the median net worth by age?

The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances for 2025 is the latest official source for the US, published in October 2026 after interviews the year before. It shows median net worth rising with the age of the family’s reference person, from the youngest group to the oldest, with the mean far above the median in every band.

All figures are in 2025 US dollars. The oldest group topping the table is new: the Fed notes that in the previous few rounds families nearing or just into retirement had the most, and it traces the recent rise among the oldest families mainly to higher values in their retirement accounts.¹

The study

Moderate evidence

Who the Fed asked in 2025, and how it counted their wealth

In 2025 the Fed interviewed 4,367 families, including an extra sample of wealthy families drawn from tax records, and weighted the results so they stand for every US family. Net worth here means a family’s gross assets minus its debts at the time it was interviewed.¹

A survey this size gives a dependable picture of US families as a whole, but each age band is a slice of it, and the oversampling of the wealthy is there to measure the top accurately. Treat each row as an estimate for that group in that year.

For Great Britain, the ONS (Office for National Statistics) publishes the equivalent from its Wealth and Assets Survey, grouped by the age of the household head and counting private pensions. Its latest release covers the two years to March 2022 during the pandemic, when interviews moved to the telephone, and the ONS says that adds uncertainty to the figures. In June 2025 it also suspended the survey’s official accreditation from this round onward while it works on quality.²

Bar chart with 7 bars; the largest is 65 to 74 at £502,500.

• 16 to 24£15,200
• 25 to 34£109,800
• 35 to 44£209,600
• 45 to 54£301,900
• 55 to 64£496,500
• 65 to 74£502,500
• 75 and above£373,100

Readers in other countries can check their national statistics office or central bank. Euro area countries feed comparable household data into the European Central Bank’s Household Finance and Consumption Survey, whose latest wave was fielded mainly in 2023.³ Whichever table you use, run through the five checks below before you set your own figure beside it.

Five checks before you trust a net worth by age chart

• Mean or median?
• Families, households or individuals?
• Are homes, retirement accounts and pensions counted?
• Which country, which survey year and which year's money?
• Is it a one-year snapshot of different families?

Why is average net worth so much higher than median?

Average net worth is higher than the median because a few very rich families drag the mean upward, while the medianmedian: The middle value when numbers are put in order, so half fall below it and half above. Unlike the average (mean), it is not pulled up or down by a few very large or very small values, which is why it is often used for incomes and wealth.Full entry in the glossary is the family halfway down the list when all are ranked. In the Fed’s 2025 survey, the mean was about four to five times the median in every age group.¹

That gap has a direct consequence for anyone reading a chart. Whenever the mean sits above the median, at least half the families in that age group sit below the mean. An “average net worth for your age” chart that quotes the mean sets a bar most families that age have not reached.

A hypothetical young US couple with US$60,000 of net worth between them shows the effect. Set beside the 2025 median for families under 35, about US$33,000, they are ahead of the middle family; set beside the mean, about US$135,400, they look far behind. The all-ages version of this gap, with the overall US and British medians, is worked through in the guide to calculating your net worth and choosing an official figure to compare.

Myth

The average net worth for your age is roughly what a typical person that age has.

Fact

An average (mean) is pulled up by the wealthiest families. The median, the middle family when all are ranked, describes the typical case far better.

If a chart says “average” without saying mean or median, find the table it came from before you measure yourself against it. Official reports such as the Fed’s and the ONS’s label every figure, so a chart that does not is a warning sign.

Household or individual: who is being counted

Neither survey counts individuals. The Fed’s survey counts the “family”, meaning the economically dominant single person or couple in a home plus anyone financially interdependent with them, and it files each family under the age of one reference person.¹ The ONS counts whole households, grouped by the age of the household head.²

So a person renting alone and a couple of the same age with two incomes land in the same age band, but the couple’s figure combines two people’s savings and two people’s debts. If you are single, a family median that includes couples’ combined wealth can set a higher bar than one person’s figure would.

The household count cuts the other way for young adults who live with their parents. In the ONS tables for the two years to March 2022, more than a third of people aged 16 to 24 lived in households with total wealth of £500,000 or more.⁴ The count follows the household, so a teenager living in a parent’s home is credited with the parent’s house and pension. Households headed by someone that age had far less, as the chart above shows.

Before you compare, decide whether your own figure covers one person or a couple, and look for a table that counts the same unit.

Does net worth include your home and retirement accounts?

In the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, yes: the home counts at the owner’s own estimate of its value, the mortgage counts as a debt, and retirement accounts, such as IRAs and certain employer plans, count as assets. Vehicles count too. Social Security and employer defined-benefit pensions are left out, because their value depends on assumptions about future pay, inflation and lifespan.¹

The ONS draws the line elsewhere. It counts four kinds of wealth: property net of mortgages, financial wealth net of debts, physical possessions from cars to collectables and contents, and private pensions already built up.² The net worth calculation guide shows how far the British median drops when pensions are left out.

Homes weigh heavily in both. In the Fed’s 2025 survey, homeowners had a median net worth of about US$458,900 and renters and other non-owners about US$10,600.¹ A middle-aged renter with a final-salary (defined-benefit) pension can look far behind on a US-style table: the survey counts none of that pension, and there is no home equity to add.

Survey year and inflation change the numbers

The same age group’s median can swing a long way between survey rounds, and every table is stated in one year’s money. Between the Fed’s 2022 and 2025 surveys, the median for families under 35 fell by about a quarter after adjusting for inflation, which the Fed attributes mainly to the unwinding of business equity gains made between the 2019 and 2022 surveys.¹ Over the three years before that, the same group’s median had more than doubled.⁵

inflationinflation: A general rise in the prices of goods and services over time, so that the same amount of money buys less. Returns are often reported after inflation, in real terms, to show what a gain is worth in buying power.Full entry in the glossary adds a second trap. The Fed’s 2023 report gave the 2022 median for all US families as US$192,900 in 2022 dollars; its 2026 report restates that same median as US$211,100 in 2025 dollars.⁵¹ The families and their wealth are identical in both reports; the later figure is counted in 2025 dollars.

A chart that mixes survey years, or puts one year’s dollars beside another’s, can show a gap that is only inflation or timing. A young adult still using the 2022 table during 2025 was measuring against a median that the next survey put lower. Check the survey year and the dollar year on any chart, and prefer the latest round.

Why a snapshot by age is not anyone’s path

An age chart compares different people at one moment. The Fed describes its survey as a cross-sectionalcross-sectional: Describes a study that measures everyone in its sample at a single point in time. Because the possible cause and the outcome are recorded together, it can show that two things occur together but not which of them came first.Full entry in the glossary survey of US families, normally repeated every three years, so the youngest and oldest families in the 2025 table are different households who came of age in different decades.⁶

That matters because each generation meets different house prices, markets and pay. The ONS notes that older homeowners may have gained from house price rises over their lifetimes, and that older households have usually paid into pensions for longer.² Today’s young adults will not necessarily reach today’s older families’ figures when they get there, or fall short of them. Some of the gap between age groups also reflects gifts and inheritances, which arrive at different ages, as explored in our article on how families pass wealth on.

The Fed does describe a broad life-cycle pattern behind the snapshot: people save for retirement through their working lives and then spend those savings, so net worth tends to rise and then level off or fall.¹ That pattern describes the average shape across many families and sets no timetable for any one household.

1. A snapshot: each bar is a different group of families, all interviewed in the same survey year
2. A path: one family measured again and again; real paths dip as well as climb
3. The fair comparison: your own figure against your earlier ones, counted the same way each time

The comparison a snapshot cannot give is with your own past. Work out your figure on a fixed date every year, using unchanged rules, and the change between those dates tells you far more than your position on a chart of other people.

What is a good net worth at 30, 40 or 50?

No official statistics body defines a good net worth for an age, and the popular formulas are rules of thumb. The best known comes from Thomas Stanley and William Danko’s The Millionaire Next Door (1996), built from their research into American millionaires: multiply your age by your pre-tax household income, divide by ten, and subtract anything you inherited.⁷

For a hypothetical 40-year-old household earning US$80,000 a year, that formula gives US$320,000. The authors used it to sort people into under-accumulators and prodigious accumulators of wealth, and the Wikipedia summary of the book notes it suits people who have been earning for longer.

Fidelity, a US investment company, publishes another rule in retirement guidance dated September 2026: savings of at least one times your salary by 30, rising to ten times by 67.⁸ Those multiples count retirement savings rather than net worth, and they rest on the company’s own assumptions, including saving 15 percent of income from age 25 and having no pension income. Change the assumptions and the multiples change.⁸

Our searches turned up no research testing whether people who hit such targets end up better off than those who miss them. Use one, if at all, as a prompt for a planning conversation, and measure progress against your own earlier figures.

Where personal advice fits

The official tables describe groups, and they cannot tell you what your own figure ought to be. That depends on your income, pension promises, housing, dependants and country. Before a large decision built on that figure, such as how much to save, borrow or invest, an adviser who is fee-only or regulated can look over your whole position.

Check anyone first. In the US, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Investor.gov site tells investors to confirm that a financial professional holds a licence, and notes that much American investment fraud comes from people with no licence or registration.⁹ Readers in the UK can look up an adviser or firm on the Financial Conduct Authority’s Financial Services Register, or use its Firm Checker, to confirm authorisation.¹⁰ Most other countries’ financial regulators run a comparable public register.

The bottom line

Of everything on a net worth by age chart, only a median from an identified official survey, for the country you live in and its latest round, counting the same unit and items as your figure, gives a fair reference point. Use it once to see where the middle sits. After that, recalculate your own figure each year on a fixed date with unchanged rules, and bring any question about what it ought to be to a fee-only or regulated adviser.