The Federal Reserve Board released the results of its 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances on October 9, 2026, with a summary report on changes since the 2022 survey. Adjusted for inflation, median family income rose 7 percent to $82,200, while mean family income fell 6 percent to $145,200.
The numbers, and the gap between them
Dollars are adjusted to 2025 with a consumer price index. Income is for the year before each survey (2021 and 2024). Net worth, assets minus debts, is measured at interview.
- Income: median $76,900 to $82,200; mean $155,300 to $145,200.
- Net worth: median $211,100 to $215,900 (up 2 percent); mean $1,164,100 to $1,241,500 (up 7 percent).
The median is the middle family: half have less, half have more. The mean is the average, which a few very large values can pull up or down. The report says medians are often less sensitive to such values. It says the fall in mean income was driven by a decline for families at the top. For the top tenth by usual (normal-year) income, its table shows mean income falling from $757,000 to $652,000; leaving out families in the top 1 percent of income, it says, mean income fell only 1 percent. Families with high income, it says, tend to have income from components that are volatile and can take very large values, primarily capital gains and business income. It says modest increases in median and mean income for families at the lower ends of the income and net worth distributions, with declines at the upper ends, indicate that "income inequality decreased slightly between surveys." For net worth, where the mean grew faster than the median, the report says such a gap is typically taken to indicate that values in the upper part of the distribution rose more than those in the lower part; on balance, it says, wealth inequality appears little changed since 2022.
Homes, retirement, stocks and debt
- Homes: homeownership was 66 percent, about unchanged.
- Retirement: among families headed by someone 64 or younger, 65.1 percent had a retirement plan (an IRA, a 401(k)-type employer account or a defined benefit pension), up from 64.4. Among families with retirement accounts, the median balance rose 11 percent to $106,000.
- Stocks: ownership, direct or indirect, fell from 58 to 56 percent; the bottom half by usual income accounted for nearly all of the decline. Among holders, the median holding rose 36 percent to $77,400.
- Debt: 77 percent had debt, about stable. Families with debt payments above 40 percent of income rose from 6.5 to 8.6 percent. The release and the report's summary call that "a level last seen in the 2013 survey"; the report's debt-burden section calls it "the largest share since 2010." The share reporting being behind on loan payments in the past year rose from 12.2 to 19.6 percent.
Age, education and race: net worth
- Under 35: median down 23 percent to $33,000, which the report attributes primarily to the unwinding of business equity gains between 2019 and 2022. 75 or older: median up 37 percent.
- No high school diploma: median down 55 percent, mean up 53.
- Black non-Hispanic families: median down 25 percent, mean up 5. Hispanic or Latino families: median up 18, mean up 34.
How the survey works, and its limits
The Board has sponsored the modern survey every three years since 1989. NORC, a University of Chicago research organization, interviewed 4,367 families in 2025 (4,602 in 2022): a random sample from 119 areas plus a supplemental sample, selected to include wealthy families disproportionately, drawn from statistical records derived from tax returns. The report says refusal is highly correlated with net worth and weighting adjusts for it.
A family is the economically dominant person or couple plus financially interdependent household members. Most interviews ran April to December 2025; about one-seventh ran January to May 2026. The report generally does not address statistical significance; its printed standard errors for the two median net worth figures are $8,200 and $6,400.
The report says the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey shows inflation-adjusted household income up 2.8 percent at the median and 2.0 percent at the mean over the same stretch. An exercise in a report footnote suggests the difference in mean income changes between the two surveys is driven at least in large part by that survey not capturing very high-income families.