What Counts as a Good Net Worth? The Real Numbers

The question everyone asks and almost nobody answers precisely

"What's a good net worth for my age?" is one of the most commonly searched personal-finance questions, and most of what turns up in response is either too vague to be useful ("it depends!") or too confident about numbers that don't actually generalise well. This article tries to do something narrower and more useful: lay out what the actual survey data says, be specific about what it does and doesn't measure, and explain why two "net worth by age" articles can give meaningfully different numbers for the same age bracket.

The actual U.S. numbers, and where they come from

The standard source for U.S. household wealth statistics is the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), conducted roughly every three years. The most recent published data, from 2022, puts median U.S. household net worth at approximately $192,700. The mean — the simple average — is roughly $1.06 million, dramatically higher than the median because a relatively small number of extremely wealthy households pull the average far above what a typical household actually has.

This gap between median and mean is the first thing worth internalising about net worth statistics generally: the median is almost always the more representative number for understanding where a typical household stands, and any statistic that leads with an average rather than a median is worth reading with extra scrutiny.

Net worth also varies enormously by age, which is expected — someone in their 20s has had far less time to accumulate assets or pay down debt than someone in their 50s. Age-banded figures from the same survey show the gap between early-career and pre-retirement households is large, which is one reason a single national median isn't a very useful personal benchmark without narrowing it down by age.

Why "does it include my house" changes everything

This is the single most consequential methodological question behind any net worth statistic, and it's rarely made explicit.

The Federal Reserve's household net worth figures do include home equity — your home's current market value as an asset, your remaining mortgage as a liability. For a majority of American households, especially homeowners, this makes home equity one of the largest single components of their reported net worth. That has a real consequence for anyone comparing their own numbers to a published benchmark: if the benchmark includes home equity and you're comparing only your liquid savings, you're not comparing like with like, and you'll look far poorer relative to the benchmark than you actually are.

This is exactly why tracking liquid net worth — cash and investments minus debt, with home equity, retirement accounts, and other illiquid assets excluded — is useful as a second, separate number rather than a replacement for total net worth. Total net worth answers "what have I accumulated." Liquid net worth answers a more practical question: "how much of that could I actually get to if I needed it this month." Both are legitimate; they're just answering different questions, and conflating them is one of the more common sources of confusion when people compare their situation to a published average.

What net worth deliberately leaves out

Net worth, as standardly measured, is a snapshot of assets and liabilities that exist today. It does not attempt to capture what economists sometimes call human capital — the present value of your future earning potential, based on your skills, education, credentials, and career trajectory.

This exclusion is deliberate and methodologically reasonable — human capital is genuinely hard to price — but it produces results that can be misleading if read without context. A newly qualified doctor, several years into medical school debt with a resident's modest salary, will very likely show a low or negative net worth on paper, despite being on a career track most people would consider financially strong. Conversely, someone with a substantial net worth built entirely from an inheritance, with no ongoing income at all, will look far stronger by this measure than their actual financial trajectory might warrant.

None of this makes net worth a bad measure — it makes it a measure of one specific thing (accumulated assets minus debt, today), not a complete financial biography. Reading a net worth number without also knowing roughly where in their earning life someone is will often lead to the wrong conclusion about how they're actually doing.

Why net worth and income tell you different things

It's worth being explicit about a distinction that gets blurred constantly in casual conversation: income measures money flowing in over a period, net worth measures what has actually accumulated after spending, saving, and debt are accounted for.

Two people earning identical salaries can have dramatically different net worth depending on saving rate and debt levels — someone diligently saving 20% of a modest income for fifteen years can easily out-accumulate someone earning twice as much who saves nothing and carries revolving debt. This is a large part of why financial planners generally treat net worth, not income, as the primary measure of financial progress: income measures effort and opportunity, net worth measures the accumulated result of choices made with that income over time.

So what should you actually compare your number to?

Given everything above, the most useful comparison isn't really "my net worth versus the national median" — it's your own net worth against your own net worth from a year ago, or a quarter ago. A national or age-banded benchmark is a useful sanity check and nothing more; your personal trend line is the number that actually reflects whether your financial decisions are working.

If you do want an external reference point, make sure you know exactly what it includes — home equity or not, individual or household, which survey year — before drawing any conclusion from where you land on it.

Putting your own number together

The Net Worth Calculator totals your assets and liabilities and reports both your total net worth and your liquid net worth separately, so you can see the accumulated-wealth view and the practical-flexibility view side by side, rather than having to run the liquid calculation by hand.

Sources

1. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2023). Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022 — the primary U.S. government source for household wealth distribution data cited throughout this article.
2. Federal Reserve — Distributional Financial Accounts, supplementary wealth-distribution data updated more frequently than the triennial SCF.

---

This article is for general informational purposes and is not financial advice. Wealth statistics reflect national survey data and may not represent any individual's or household's specific circumstances.