Wealth Inequality Statistics (2026)

Before any number, one distinction shapes everything: wealth (net worth, what you own minus what you owe) is far more concentrated than income (annual earnings). People routinely conflate the two.

The gap between them is measurable. The US wealth Gini coefficient is about 0.85, among the highest in the developed world, while the income Gini is about 0.41. Assets like stocks, real estate, and business equity pile up at the top far more than paychecks do, so every figure below is about wealth unless noted.

The distribution is steeply top-heavy. In Q2 2026 the top 1% of households held 32.5% of all wealth and the top 10% about 68.9%, leaving the bottom half of the country with just 2.3% (see the chart and table below).

Put differently, the wealthiest 1% own more than the entire bottom 90% combined (32.5% against 31.1%). The middle 40% (the 50th to 90th percentiles, effectively the middle class) hold 28.8%, down from 35.7% in 1989.

This is not static. The top 1%'s share climbed from 23.0% in 1989 to 30.9% at the end of 2024 and a record 32.5% in Q2 2026, the highest in the Fed's series, which begins in 1989. The top 0.1% alone went from 8.7% to 15.0% (Fed DFA).

The divergence is stark in growth terms: the top 1%'s real wealth has risen roughly 300% since 1989, while the bottom 50%'s real wealth is essentially flat over the same 35 years.

In dollar terms the numbers are staggering. The top 1%'s wealth reached about $60.3 trillion in Q2 2026, up from $51.6 trillion a year earlier, a gain of about $8.7 trillion in twelve months (Fed DFA).

By contrast, the entire bottom 50%, some 66 million households, held about $4.3 trillion combined in Q2 2026. The wealthiest 1% hold about fourteen times the wealth of the bottom half of the country put together.

Where do the lines fall? The Fed's 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances put median family net worth at $215,900, up 2% in real terms from 2022. In the 2022 data it took about $1.56 million to reach the top 10% and roughly $11.6 million to reach the top 1% (see the table below).

The skew is captured by one comparison: mean net worth ($1.24 million in 2025) is about 5.8 times the median, because a small number of ultra-wealthy households drag the average far above what a typical family holds. The median family in the bottom quarter had $1,700 in 2025, while the median family in the top 10% had $4.9 million.

The single biggest engine of wealth concentration is stock ownership. In Q2 2026 the top 10% of households owned 88.1% of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares, and the top 1% alone owned 50.9%; the bottom 50% owned just 0.6% (see the chart above).

This is why rising markets widen the wealth gap: when stocks rally, almost all the gains accrue to households that already own them. The bottom half, holding little or no equity, are largely left out.

Wealth divides sharply by race. In the Fed's 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances the typical White family had a net worth of $332,100, about nine times the typical Black family ($36,800), the largest ratio recorded since 2016, and a bit more than four times the typical Hispanic family ($79,600) (see the chart and table below).

Framed another way, for every $100 of wealth held by a White family, a Black family held about $11. The direction changed after 2022: Black families' real median fell 25% between 2022 and 2025 while White families' rose 6%, widening the absolute dollar gap to about $295,000. Hispanic families gained 18%, and the White-Hispanic ratio was the smallest on record.

There is a gender dimension too. The typical single man held $82,100 in 2022 versus $58,100 for the typical single woman (see the table below).

The gap is starkest for mothers: unmarried women with children had a median wealth of just $10,700. Age complicates the comparison, older single women without kids can match single men, but among the under-65, the gap reappears.

Zoom out and the concentration is even more extreme. The roughly 58 million adults worth over $1 million, just 1.5% of the world's adults, held 48.4% of all global wealth at the end of 2025, while the 42.1% of adults with under $10,000 held about 0.6% (see the table below, UBS Global Wealth Report 2026).

Oxfam frames it more bluntly: the world's top 1% own more wealth than the bottom 95% of humanity combined. (Oxfam is an advocacy group using Forbes and UBS inputs; treat its framing accordingly.)

At the very top, the billionaire class keeps growing. Forbes' 2026 list counts 3,428 billionaires worth about $20 trillion combined, up from 3,028 worth $16.1 trillion in 2025; 991 of them are US citizens, up from 902.

The concentration is accelerating: Oxfam estimated total billionaire wealth surged about $2.5 trillion in 2025 alone, roughly three times the pace of the prior five years. (Oxfam is an advocacy group; its estimate is secondary.)

The income side feeds the wealth side, most visibly through executive pay. The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio at the largest US firms rose to about 325-to-1 in 2025, from 290-to-1 in 2024, against 21-to-1 in 1965 and 31-to-1 in 1978 (see the table below). Average realized CEO pay was about $27.9 million.

From 1978 to 2025, realized CEO pay rose about 1,316% while typical worker compensation rose about 28%, and net productivity 86% (EPI). High executive incomes convert into the concentrated assets, stocks and equity stakes, that show up in the wealth figures above.

The mechanics are self-reinforcing. Wealth compounds: those who already own appreciating assets, stocks, real estate, businesses, see them grow, while those living paycheck to paycheck cannot accumulate in the first place.

Returns to capital have generally outpaced wage growth, so the share of the economy flowing to asset owners rather than workers has risen. And because asset ownership is so concentrated, every market and housing boom widens the gap further.

The flip side of concentration at the top is stagnation below. The bottom 50%'s real wealth has barely moved since 1989, and one in ten households has essentially no net worth at all.

The middle 40% has fared better in absolute terms, median wealth roughly quadrupled nominally from 1989 to 2022, but their share of the total pie has slipped as the top pulled away. Housing, not stocks, is the middle's main asset, which is why it lagged the equity-driven gains at the top.

The core lesson is that the wealth gap is, above all, an ownership gap: the households pulling ahead are the ones that own appreciating assets, especially stocks. That is a structural problem for policy, but also a personal signal.

For an individual, the most reliable on-ramp to building wealth is to become an asset owner as early and consistently as possible, contributing to retirement and brokerage accounts, owning broad, low-cost index funds, and letting compounding work over decades. You cannot fix the macro distribution alone, but you can make sure you are on the ownership side of it.