"Ahead" or "behind" depends on which number you're held against. The typical household is a fairer yardstick than the mean, which a few very wealthy households pull up.
"Am I behind?" is a question a lot of us carry around, and it almost never comes with the next question attached: behind whom? The answer changes a lot depending on which number you pick.
Take net worth for families headed by someone under 35. In the Fed's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the typical (median) family in that group had $39,000. The mean, the plain add-it-up-and-divide number, was $183,500.4 Same families, same survey, same year. One number is almost five times the other. If you measure yourself against the second one, the typical family comes up $144,500 short.
So this page does one simple thing. It sets your income and net worth next to the typical household your age, shows the mean beside it, and lets you see the gap between the two for yourself.
Figure 1.1. Two Yardsticks, Every Age
Figure 1.1 Two Yardsticks, Every Age
Paired marks for each age band: median and mean family net worth, SCF 2022. · Age Median Mean · Under 35 $39,000 $183,500 · 35–44 $135,600 $549,600 · 45–54 $247,200 $975,800 · 55–64 $364,500 $1,566,900 · 65–74 $409,900 $1,794,600 · 75+ $335,600 $1,624,100 · All families $192,900 $1,063,700
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Sources and notesHide sources
Source: Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances 2022, Table 4, net worth by age of reference person, 2022 dollars, home equity included.4
Read across the rows and the pattern never breaks. The median climbs with age, peaks at 65–74 at $409,900, and eases off after that. The mean does the same dance at a much higher altitude: $1,794,600 at 65–74. Across all families it's $192,900 for the median and $1,063,700 for the mean, about 5.5 times as much.4
Why the gap? The median is the family in the middle of the line: half have more, half have less. The mean adds everyone up and divides, so a few very large balances drag it upward. Picture nine friends at a bar with $50,000 each, and then a billionaire walks in. The mean net worth in the room just jumped past $100 million. Nobody's finances changed. The median didn't move at all: it's still $50,000.
That's not just a bar story. The Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts estimate that in the second quarter of 2026, the top 1% of US households held 32.5% of the country's net worth, the top 10% held 68.9%, and the bottom half held 2.3%.5 Looking back further with tax data, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that the top 0.1% share "has risen from 7% in 1978 to 22% in 2012, a level almost as high as in 1929."6 Those are different sources measured different ways, so they don't belong in one chart, but they point the same direction. When wealth bunches up at the top, the mean drifts away from the typical household, and it stops being a useful yardstick for most of us.
Figure 1.2. Income, Same Yardstick
Figure 1.2 Income, Same Yardstick
Median household income by age of householder, 2024 dollars. · 25–29 $82,560 · 30–34 $97,250 · 35–39 $104,800 · 40–44 $107,100 · 45–49 $119,500 · 50–54 $115,100 · 55–59 $101,000 · 60–64 $83,770 · 65+ $56,680
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Income gets the same treatment. Across all US households, the median in 2024 was $83,730.3 By age, the typical household income rises from $82,560 at 25–29 to a peak of $119,500 at 45–49, then comes back down to $56,680 for households 65 and older.3 2 The mean runs above the median here too (for 30–34, it's $124,700 against a median of $97,250), but the gap is much smaller than it is for wealth.2 Paychecks bunch up less at the top than balances do.
Two honest caveats come with these tables. First, they're published in age bands, not single ages, so the tool puts you in the band that holds your age and doesn't guess at anything in between. Second, the income numbers are in 2024 dollars and the net-worth numbers are in 2022 dollars. They come from two different surveys, and the page labels both instead of quietly blending them.4 2
Figure 1.4 Projected Path
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Meet our sample person: 32 years old, earning $70,000, with $70,000 to their name. Against the typical household their age, their income is at 72%, a bit under the middle. Against the typical family their age, their net worth is at 179%, well past it. Same person, two different stories on one screen.
That sample person is a teaching default used across the site, not the typical 32-year-old: their income is below the median for their age and their savings are above it.
Now swap in the means. Against a $183,500 mean, that same $70,000 looks like a shortfall. Nothing about the person changed. Only the yardstick did. That's the whole point of the page: before "ahead" or "behind" means anything, you need to know what you're being held against.
One more thing the page doesn't do. It never says "you're ahead of X% of people your age." The published by-age tables give medians and means, not percentile ranks, so a percent of the median is all it can honestly show.4 2
What this is not
This isn't a ranking, a grade, or a target. A percent of the median tells you where a published middle sits next to your number, and nothing about whether your number is right for your life. The data are survey snapshots from 2022 and 2024, and the page isn't a forecast. Education, not advice.
Try it: You Are Here. Put in your own age, income and net worth, and see which yardstick you've been using.
Notes
- Fidelity Investments (2026). How much should I save for retirement? Fidelity Viewpoints, June 8, 2026. Industry rule of thumb (popular framing). https://www.fidelity.com/viewpoints/retirement/how-much-money-should-I-save. Accessed 2026-10-08. ↩
- U.S. Census Bureau (2025). HINC-02. Age of Householder - Households, by Total Money Income in 2024, Type of Household, Race and Hispanic Origin of Householder (CPS ASEC 2025), All Races. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2025/demo/cps/hinc-02.html. Accessed 2026-10-08. ↩ a b c d e f g h i
- U.S. Census Bureau (2025). Income in the United States: 2024 (P60-286), Table A-1. https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-286.html. Accessed 2026-10-08. ↩ a b c d
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2023). Survey of Consumer Finances 2022, Table 4 (net worth by age of reference person, median and mean, 2022 dollars). https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/files/scf2022_tables_internal_real_historical.xlsx. Accessed 2026-10-08. ↩ a b c d e f g h i
- Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2026). Distributional Financial Accounts, wealth shares by wealth percentile, 2026:Q2. https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/. Accessed 2026-10-08. ↩
- Saez, E., & Zucman, G. (2016). Wealth Inequality in the United States since 1913: Evidence from Capitalized Income Tax Data. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(2), 519–578. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjw004. Accessed 2026-10-08. ↩
- [M] Model note. You Are Here places your age in the nearest published band (no interpolation) and shows your income and net worth as a percent of that band's median, next to its mean. Any "what it would take" line is the tool's own 7% real a year model, not a published figure. It never gives a percentile. ↩ a b c