Average and median net worth by age

Whose wealth and whose age?

“Household” here means the SCF family, or primary economic unit: the economically dominant individual or couple and financially interdependent household members. It is not a distribution of individual adults. Use assets and debts for that whole economic unit.

The reference person is the single core individual, the male in a mixed-sex core couple, or the older person in a same-sex core couple, as defined by the SCF. The six broad age groups follow the official AGECL categories; the final group is 75 or older.

Five implicates, one point estimate

The public extract has 21,800 records for 4,360 sampled families. Each family has five completed versions (implicates) to handle missing answers. They are not five independent families. We pool all five using WGT as supplied; the extract already defines WGT = X42001 / 5, so it is not divided again. Weights may differ across implicates.

The mean is Σ(weight × net worth) / Σ(weight). The median is the smallest observed value whose cumulative weight reaches half the total, without interpolation. We do not average five separately calculated medians. Dollar values are not adjusted to the current year.

Percentiles count ties fairly

Percentile = 100 × (weight below x + ½ weight equal to x) / total weight

The calculator uses exact cumulative weights aggregated at every distinct net-worth value. An amount between observed values keeps the same rank; there is no interpolation through a coarse percentile table. Negative net worth and zero stay in the distribution. This weighted midrank differs from the share strictly below or the share at or below an amount when values are tied.

An estimate, with survey limitations

Sampling, nonresponse and missing-answer imputation create uncertainty, particularly in the wealth tails and smaller age groups. We have not computed replicate-weight standard errors or confidence intervals. Results use at most one decimal and show <0.1% or >99.9% at the extremes; this is a display convention, not a claim of that accuracy.

Checked against the public-data table

Automated checks reproduce all seven medians in the official public-data Table 4 exactly; each calculated mean is within $5 of its stored reference value. Those checks validate reproduction, not survey certainty. Public data are disclosure-protected and differ from the confidential internal estimates used in the bulletin; we do not substitute the bulletin figures.

Independent calculation and privacy

This is an independent educational tool, not a Federal Reserve product or endorsement. Validation was automated; we do not claim external human approval. Your net worth is not transmitted or stored. Selecting a broad age group downloads its public aggregate dataset, without family or record identifiers. No exact age is requested. Your selected broad age group appears in the public dataset URL and may be visible to our hosting provider; your net worth is never included.