What America is worth
Household net worth: homes, stocks, businesses, savings and pensions, minus mortgages and other debts. Before 1945 the figures are historians' estimates of national wealth, so treat them as rough.
Log scale: each gridline is ten times the one below it. Dashed line = pre-1945 estimates. Small ticks along the bottom mark the events in the timeline.
How the pie is sliced
Pick any slice of the richest households and see how much of the nation's wealth they hold in the selected year. The second pie breaks the whole country into five wealth groups.
The richest 1% vs. everyone else
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Five wealth groups
Groups are ranked by net worth, by household. "Bottom 50%" is half of all households; "Top 0.1%" is one household in a thousand.
Wealth shares for slices other than 0.1%, 1%, 10% and 50% are interpolated between those published points. 1774 and 1860 cover free households only; in 1860, enslaved people were counted as their enslavers' property.
Typical wealth by group
Poor, middle class, wealthy, ultra-wealthy
Poverty and class are measured by income; wealth groups by net worth. Both views are below, with the source behind each.
Share of Americans in poverty
The 2025 rate of 10.2% is the lowest on record. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts benefits and expenses, was 13.1%. No official rate exists before 1959; government economists later estimated roughly a third of Americans were poor in the late 1940s.
Income tiers, 1971 vs. 2023
Middle income means two-thirds to double the median household income (about $61,000 to $183,000 for a family of three in 2022). The middle shrank from 61% to 51%; the upper tier grew more than the lower one.
The wealth ladder
| Group | Households | Share | Total held | Avg. per household |
|---|
Totals combine the selected year's net worth with the nearest wealth-share estimate. Household counts before 2026 are estimated from population and average household size. 2026 uses the Fed's count of 134.8 million households.
Who is in poverty
How many Americans are locked up
The share of the population in state and federal prison, from 1925 to today, and how that rate differs by race, sex, age and type of place.
State and federal prisoners serving more than a year, per 100,000 U.S. residents. Local jails, which hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences, add roughly 600,000 more.
Imprisonment rate by group
Who comes to America
The share of residents born in another country, where they come from, their legal status and where they settle. The immigrant share peaked around 1890–1910, fell to a low in 1970, and reached a new record in early 2025 before falling.
Foreign-born share of the U.S. population. 1850–2010: decennial census; 2019: American Community Survey; 2025–26: Current Population Survey estimates, which run somewhat higher than the census surveys.
Immigrants by group
New green cards per decade
The 1900s wave (8.2 million) was not matched until the 1990s, when the 1986 amnesty added about 2.7 million legalizations. The 1924 quota law and the Depression cut arrivals to 0.7 million in the 1930s.
How America compares
The U.S. has the world's largest economy and the most millionaires. Its average adult is among the richest on earth, but its typical (median) adult ranks far lower, because so much of the wealth sits at the top.
Share of the world economy
Wealth per adult
Millionaires by country
The U.S. added more than 440,000 millionaires in 2025, nearly half of all new millionaires worldwide.
Two centuries of economic power
China and India produced half the world's output in 1820. The U.S. passed them by 1913 and peaked after World War II. These are long-run historical estimates and end in 2008; on a purchasing-power basis China's economy is now larger than America's.
Everything at once
Every measure on this page for the selected year, the main trends on a single chart, and one table with all of it, year by year.
All trends on one timeline
Values in the buttons are for the selected year (or the nearest year with data). Hover a point for its actual value.
The full table
Presidents and events that moved the money
The decisions and shocks that most changed how much wealth America had and who held it. The highlighted entries are nearest the year you've selected. Tap "Go to year" to jump there.