Racial Wealth Gap Statistics (2026)

The single clearest snapshot comes from the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the gold-standard triennial wealth survey. The typical White family held $285,000 in net worth, versus $44,900 for the typical Black family and $61,600 for the typical Hispanic family (see the chart and table below).

That means the median Black family had about 16 cents of wealth for every dollar the median White family held, and the median Hispanic family about 22 cents. Asian families, broken out for the first time in 2022, topped the list at $536,000, nearly double the White median.

Medians describe the typical family, but averages capture how much total wealth each group commands, and they are far more lopsided. Average White wealth was $1.37 million in 2022 versus $211,000 for Black families and $227,000 for Hispanic families (see the table below).

So at the mean the White-Black wealth gap crossed $1 million for the first time, a gap of over $1.15 million per family. Averages run so far above medians because a small number of very wealthy households, disproportionately White, pull the mean upward.

Analysts often express the gap as wealth held per $100 of White wealth, and by that measure there has been slow improvement. In 2013 Black families held about $9 and Hispanic families about $10 for every $100 of White wealth; by 2022 those figures rose to $16 and $22 respectively.

It is real progress, but it still leaves Black and Hispanic families with a small fraction of White wealth. And the ratio only closed because Black and Hispanic wealth grew off a very low base, not because the dollar distance shrank, as the next sections show.

Zoom out three decades and the picture is one of durability. In 1989, in today's dollars, the White median was about $164,000 against just $9,200 for Black families and $12,100 for Hispanic families (see the table below).

By 2022 every group was richer, but the Black-to-White median ratio moved only from roughly 6% to 16% over 33 years. NCRC frames it bluntly: the Black-White median wealth gap was 86% in 1992 and 85% in 2022, essentially unchanged (NCRC).

The headline from 2019 to 2022 was fast minority gains: the typical Black family's wealth rose 61% and the typical Hispanic family's 47%, versus 31% for White families. Housing and business equity drove most of those gains.

But percentage growth on a small base loses to slower growth on a large one. Because White families started with far more, the absolute White-Black and White-Hispanic median gaps each grew by roughly $50,000 and topped $220,000 in 2022. Faster growth did not close the dollar distance, it widened it.

For most American families a home is the largest asset they will ever own, which makes the homeownership gap the single biggest engine of the wealth divide. About 73.8% of White householders owned their home in late 2023 versus 45.9% of Black householders, a gap of roughly 28 percentage points (see the chart and table below).

That gap has barely moved, and in some years widened, since the 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed overt discrimination. Black applicants were still denied mortgages most often in 2024 at a 27.1% denial rate, and missing out on decades of home equity compounds directly into the wealth gap.

The wealth gap is also an investing gap. In 2022, 66% of White families owned stock directly or indirectly versus 39% of Black and 28% of Hispanic families, and the median White stock holding of $67,800 was more than four times the $16,500 median Black holding (see the chart and table below).

Retirement accounts show the same split: 62% of White families had one versus 35% of Black and 28% of Hispanic families, with median balances of $100,000, $39,000 and $55,600 respectively. Lower participation means Black and Hispanic families captured far less of the market's long bull run, so the gap compounds every year stocks rise.

A common assumption is that the wealth gap simply mirrors income, but the numbers say otherwise. In 2022 the White median family income was about $81,100 versus $46,000 for Black and $46,700 for Hispanic families, a gap of roughly 1.8 to 1.

Yet the wealth gap is more than six to one. The difference between a 1.8x income gap and a 6x wealth gap is accumulated assets: home equity, inherited money, and decades of compounding investment returns that income alone cannot capture. Wealth, not salary, is where the divide lives.

Aggregate wealth shares underline how concentrated ownership is. In the Fed's data, White households held roughly 87% of all household wealth while making up about 68% of households, and Black and Hispanic households held only about 3% each despite being much larger shares of the population.

The St. Louis Fed, using the Distributional Financial Accounts, reaches the same conclusion: since the Great Recession the typical Black and Hispanic family has held only about $10 to $15 of wealth for every $100 held by the typical White family (St. Louis Fed).

Debt is the mirror image of wealth, and student loans weigh most heavily on Black families. Across all families the average Black student-loan balance was $18,800 in 2022, roughly double the $9,100 average for White families (see the table below).

The share of Black families carrying student debt rose from 30% to 36% between 2019 and 2022 while the White share held flat at 20%. Long-run repayment is even more unequal: research finds that 20 years after starting college the median Black borrower still owes about 95% of the original balance while the median White borrower has paid off 94%.

The gap did not appear by accident, it was built by policy. Slavery, the collapse of Reconstruction, and Jim Crow blocked Black families from accumulating and passing on wealth for generations, and the New Deal's Social Security Act initially excluded farm and domestic workers, categories that covered most Black workers at the time.

Twentieth-century housing policy locked it in. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation's redlining maps color-coded Black neighborhoods as hazardous for lending, and severe discrimination kept most Black veterans from using the GI Bill's home and education benefits, cutting them out of the postwar suburban wealth boom (Brookings).

The 2022 SCF broke out Asian American families for the first time, and their $536,000 median topped every other group, including White families. But that single number hides enormous variation, since the category spans recent refugees and multi-generation professional households alike.

The same caution applies to every group here: a median is one family in the middle, not a description of everyone. Within-group differences by education, immigration history, region, and family structure are often larger than the gaps between the medians shown above.

The arithmetic of the gap carries a hard lesson: because it is a gap in accumulated assets, closing it requires owning appreciating assets, chiefly homes and diversified investments, not just earning more. The faster percentage gains of 2019 to 2022 show ground can be gained when asset ownership rises.

For individual families the levers are the boring, durable ones: getting into the market early and consistently, capturing every employer retirement match, keeping costs low, and holding through downturns so returns can compound. None of this substitutes for policy, but broad, low-cost ownership of stocks and homes is how wealth is built one household at a time.