The oldest Americans are now the richest. The Fed said so on Friday. People 75 and older have a median net worth of $505,000. That’s up 37% in three years, after inflation. People under 35 went the other way. Their median fell 23%.
The numbers come from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. It runs every three years. The Journal’s Rachel Louise Ensign writes that it’s treated as the best measure of household wealth there is. The typical family did fine, if not great. Median net worth rose 2% from 2022 to 2025, to about $216,000. That’s a sharp slowdown. The three years before that saw a 37% jump, the biggest in the survey’s 30-plus years, on rising stock and home prices.
This time the gains went to the top and to the old. Median wealth for the top 10% of earners rose 31%. The bottom 40% of earners lost ground. Black families saw their median net worth fall 25%. People without a high-school diploma lost 55%, the worst drop the survey has ever recorded for that group. And one family in five, 20%, was behind on a loan payment in 2025. That’s up from 12% in 2022 and the highest share since 2010. Roughly, from the paper’s chart, the 65-to-74 and 45-to-54 groups slipped a little as well.
What the oldest owners did right
Few people in their eighties out-save a young worker on wages. The gain came from time. NYU economist Edward Wolff told the Journal that older Americans used to get poorer as they aged and spent down savings. That has reversed. Many people 75 and older bought a home and some stock decades ago, the paper says, and the gains piled up from there. The S&P 500 rose 78% from the end of 2022 to the end of 2025, the paper notes. The older and richer groups own more stock than everyone else. Wolff put it in seven words. “They hit things at the right time.”
Our read
This is Retirement (M10) and Investments (IN04). The 75-plus gain is made of two things, a home bought long ago and stocks held through every scare since. There’s no trick in it. A household under 55 can copy the habit, and the habit is the whole lesson. Own some of the market in a retirement account and keep buying on a schedule. Own the roof you live under if the numbers work, then stay put long enough for it to matter. Keep every loan current, because the other side of this survey is one family in five behind on a payment. Our Oct. 3 piece on renting versus buying landed in the same place. The engine is the habit. The house and the stocks are just where the habit shows up.
For the retiree sitting on that gain, the survey can’t answer the question that matters. How much of it gets spent, given away or protected is a plan decision. The paper adds that stocks kept rising this year. That’s the paper’s aside, and our fall caution stands, so we wouldn’t plan on the next three years looking like the last three. A gain this size deserves a written plan for drawing it down. The umbrella gets bought on a dry day. So does the plan for spending what the dry years built.