Rising to Top Net Worth, by Age

The Survey of Consumer Finances from the Federal Reserve asks people about their assets and debt, which are used to estimate net worth. With the most recent release for 2022 (the survey runs every three years), see how your household’s net worth compares against others’.

The chart uses percentiles, where 99th percentile means you have a higher net worth than 99% of households, and 50th percentile (a.k.a. median) means you’re right in the middle. Values are split by age, because we don’t really need to compare net worths between retired folks and new college grads.

The interesting part (or terrible, depending on your point of view) is that the SCF doesn’t cap assets, debt, and income in the hundred thousand range like most government surveys. So we get a clearer picture of how we measure up.

You also get to see how little you have compared against the very top. To avoid rendering the slider above completely useless, I had to impose my own cap of $3 million. In case you’re wondering what net worth you need to be in the 95th and 99th percentiles in age groups beyond the 20s, the breaks are in the table below. Or you can just skip it.

Those are some high dollar amounts. Yup.

Notes

• The 2022 data comes from the Survey of Consumer Finances. I used the summary extract public data.
• I analyzed and prepared the data in R. I used D3.js to make the chart.