Wealth Up 37% for Over-75s, Down 23% for Under-35s, Fed Survey Shows
October 10, 2026 · Frisian News
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The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances shows inflation-adjusted median net worth rose 37% for families headed by someone over 75 between 2022 and 2025, while falling 23% for those under 35. The report undercuts official claims that post-pandemic economic gains reached all age groups equally.
The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, released Friday, shows that inflation-adjusted median net worth for families headed by someone 75 or older rose 37% between 2022 and 2025. For families headed by someone under 35, it fell 23%. Those two numbers, published in the same report, demolish the claim that post-pandemic economic gains have been broadly shared.
The Federal Reserve's own language is blunt. "Net worth declined substantially for the youngest families, while exhibiting large gains for the oldest," the report said. The driver for older families was retirement accounts, whose value climbed as stock prices rose. The driver of younger families' losses was the unwinding of business-equity gains built between 2019 and 2022.
The headline aggregates in the same report look more comfortable. Overall real median net worth rose 2% to $215,900, and median family income adjusted for inflation rose 7% to $82,200, Reuters reported citing the survey. Officials pointing to those numbers can argue the economy delivered. The disaggregated data tells a different story.
The bottom fourth of households saw their median net worth fall more than 50%, from $3,800 to $1,700, according to the survey as reported by Reuters. The share of families reporting they were behind on loan payments jumped from about 12% to almost 20%. The share of families spending more than 40% of their income on debt payments rose from 6.5% to 8.6%, the highest reading since the 2013 survey. The median debt payment as a share of income rose 2 percentage points to 15.4%, Reuters reported.
Stocks are the mechanism. The wealthiest 10% of Americans own roughly 87% of U.S. stock market wealth, Federal Reserve data show. Yet stock market participation across all households fell slightly, from 58% in 2022 to 56% in 2025, according to the survey. Consumer prices rose about 10% over the same period, the Daily Wire reported, eroding the purchasing power of families with no significant assets to ride the market.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent argued the Federal Reserve bears direct responsibility. "By failing to deliver on its inflation mandate, the Fed allowed class and generational disparities to worsen," Bessent wrote in a spring 2025 essay. He argued the Fed's policies boosted asset prices while inflation made homeownership harder for younger Americans. The Fed's long-term inflation target is 2%, the Daily Wire noted. It did not meet it.
Harvard's fall 2025 youth poll found that 43% of young Americans said they were struggling or getting by with limited financial security, the Daily Wire reported. An NBER working paper published in May 2025 by economists Moritz Kuhn and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull, drawing on an earlier wave of the same survey, found that younger generations accumulate less wealth than their predecessors did at comparable ages.
The Trump administration's answer is Trump Accounts: tax-deferred investment accounts for children under 18, with a one-time $1,000 federal seed contribution for U.S. citizens born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028. A single thousand dollars does not close a 60-percentage-point spread in net-worth trajectories between the oldest and youngest families in America.
Published October 10, 2026 · Frisian News