Racial Wealth Gap Statistics (2026)

The single clearest snapshot comes from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, the gold-standard triennial wealth survey, whose 2025 wave was released in October 2026. The typical White family held $332,100 in net worth, versus $36,800 for the typical Black family and $79,600 for the typical Hispanic family (Federal Reserve; see the chart and table below).

That means the median Black family had about 11 cents of wealth for every dollar the median White family held, and the median Hispanic family about 24 cents. Asian families topped the list at $677,600, about twice 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 $1.69 million in 2025 versus $242,400 for Black families and $334,100 for Hispanic families (see the table below).

So at the mean the White-Black wealth gap was about $1.45 million per family, up from about $1.26 million in 2022 in 2025 dollars. 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. In 2013 Black families held about $9 and Hispanic families about $10 for every $100 of White wealth; by 2022 those figures had risen to about $16 and $22.

The 2025 survey broke that trend for Black families: their share fell back to about $11 per $100, while Hispanic families rose to about $24. The Fed called the nine-to-one White-Black median ratio the largest since 2016, and the White-Hispanic ratio the smallest in the modern SCF.

Zoom out three and a half decades and the picture is one of durability. In 1989, in 2025 dollars, the White median was about $179,500 against just $10,100 for Black families and $13,200 for Hispanic families (see the table below).

By 2025 the Black-to-White median ratio had moved only from roughly 6% to 11%, after peaking near 16% in 2022. NCRC, looking at 1992 to 2022, framed it bluntly: the Black-White median wealth gap was 86% in 1992 and 85% in 2022, essentially unchanged (NCRC).

From 2022 to 2025 Hispanic families grew fastest: median wealth up 18% and mean wealth up 34%, against 6% and 13% for White families. Black families went the other way, with median wealth down 25% even as their mean rose 5%, a decline the Fed noted stands in contrast to increases seen since 2013.

But percentage growth on a small base loses to slower growth on a large one. Even with faster growth, the White-Hispanic median gap widened from about $244,500 to $252,500 in 2025 dollars, and the White-Black gap widened from about $262,800 to $295,300. The same pattern held from 2019 to 2022, when faster Black and Hispanic gains still left both dollar gaps larger.

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. In the second quarter of 2026, 74.5% of non-Hispanic White householders owned their home versus 45.4% of Black and 48.1% of Hispanic householders, a White-Black gap of about 29 percentage points (Census Bureau; see the chart and table below).

The 2025 SCF tells the same story (74.5% of White families versus 46.5% of Black families), and the 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 (Pew; see the chart and table below). Direct stock ownership in the 2025 SCF was 23.5% for White families versus 7.0% for Black and 9.2% for Hispanic families.

Retirement accounts show the same split: in 2025, 63.4% of White families had one versus 33.4% of Black and 34.6% of Hispanic families, with median balances among holders of $145,600, $31,200 and $38,000 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 the 2025 survey (measuring 2024 income, in 2025 dollars) White median family income was about $95,300 versus $49,400 for Black and $66,800 for Hispanic families, a White-Black gap of roughly 1.9 to 1. Black median income fell 2% between surveys while Hispanic median income rose 31%.

Yet the median wealth gap is nine to one. The difference between a 1.9x income gap and a 9x 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 Distributional Financial Accounts, White households held 82.4% of all household net worth in Q2 2026, while Black households held 3.2% and Hispanic households 2.4% (Federal Reserve DFA). In the 2025 SCF, White families were 60.6% of families, Black families 13.9% and Hispanic families 11.8%.

The gap is widest in stocks: White households held 86.8% of corporate equities and mutual fund shares in Q2 2026, versus 0.6% for Black and 0.7% for Hispanic households. The St. Louis Fed 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 SCF began breaking out Asian American families in 2022, and their median rose 16% to $677,600 in 2025, topping every other group, including White families. Asian families were about 4% of families in 2025, and their median income actually fell between surveys, so that single wealth number hides enormous variation across a category that 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 2025 survey shows both directions: Hispanic families gained ground as wealth grew, while the Black median fell back to its widest gap with White families since 2016.

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.