What the 2025 survey shows
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The numbers
20222025
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Who is counted. The Survey of Consumer Finances interviews a few thousand families every three years and weights them to stand for every U.S. family. A family here is the people in a household who share finances: a couple and their dependents, or a single person. Groups like age, education and work describe the family's reference person (for a couple, the man in a mixed-sex couple or the older partner in a same-sex couple, by the Fed's convention); race or ethnicity describes the person who answered. Income percentiles group families by that year's income, so a family can move between groups from one survey to the next.
Net worth is everything a family owns (homes, accounts, businesses, cars) minus everything it owes, at the time of the interview. Promised pensions and Social Security are not counted. Income is before-tax income from every source in the calendar year before the survey: the 2025 survey's income is 2024's. All dollars are the Fed's, adjusted to 2025 dollars with the CPI-U-RS price index.
Median or mean. The median is the family in the middle; the mean is the total divided by the number of families, pulled up by the very rich. When the mean grows faster than the median, the gains went mostly to the top. Medians move less from survey to survey and are the better guide to a typical family, but each estimate has a sampling error: the Fed puts its 2025 all-family median net worth at $215,900 with a standard error of $6,400, so changes of a few percent between surveys are within the noise. Small groups (families without a high school diploma, the bottom quarter by wealth) move the most for that reason.
Debt stress is measured among families with any debt: the share with any payment 60 days or more past due in the last year, the share whose debt payments are more than 40% of income, and the median ratio of payments to income. The Fed publishes it only by income, wealth, age and home ownership, so other splits show all families.
Tables and Bulletin. The historical tables used here differ by a few hundred dollars from the Fed's report on the 2025 survey: median net worth $216,100 against the report's $215,900, median income $82,200 in both. The page uses the tables throughout so that all thirteen surveys are on the same footing; the build checks them against the report and fails if any headline figure is more than 1% off.
Method. scripts/build_data.py downloads the Fed's workbook and copies its cells into data.js; the page computes only percent changes and ratios from them. This page describes survey data. It is not financial advice.
For where one family's own numbers fall among families its age, see Where Do I Stand?