Where You Stand: Real Numbers on American Income, Wealth, and Retirement

Where You Stand

See your numbers in context. Powered by Figmetric.

Enter a few numbers — household type, age, state, and whatever you know about income, net worth, or retirement savings — and see three separate comparisons: your income against households like yours, your wealth against your age band, and your retirement savings against savers your age. Each lens stands on its own. Nothing is combined into a score.

Your numbers never leave your device. Nothing is saved unless you choose “Save on this device” — all calculations run entirely in your browser. We count page visits in aggregate; we never see your numbers.

Where you stand locally: your state

Why household composition comes first

Comparing a single person's income to the overall household median is apples-to-oranges: married-couple families pull the overall median up, and one-adult households pull it down. That's why the tool asks for household status before income — the Census publishes medians by household type so you can compare against households actually like yours. The selector has six options:

• Single / one-adult household → nonfamily households: $52,200 (Census CPS ASEC 2026, 2025 income, 2025 dollars)
• Married couple → married-couple families: $132,400 (same source)
• Unmarried partnered household → overall household median $87,460, labeled as a broader comparison — the Census publishes no clean national median for this household structure, so the tool doesn't force the married-couple median onto it
• Married/partnered with children → married-couple median $132,400 with a labeled fallback (no official children-status cut is published)
• Single parent → both no-spouse-present cuts shown separately ($63,530 / $86,000), with a labeled fallback
• Other household → overall median $87,460

One disclosure the Census definitions force on us: the official "married-couple" category is husband-and-wife households. Unmarried partners without related household members are generally counted as nonfamily households in Census definitions — which is exactly why they get their own selector option and their own labeled comparison instead of a silent proxy.

State medians are income-only

State-level medians come from the 2024 American Community Survey 1-year estimates (2024 dollars) — the latest official vintage, since the 2025 ACS 1-year release is delayed with no date set. A few reference points:

• California: $100,149 (#5 of 50 states)
• Median state: about $77,803 (the middle two: Florida $77,735, North Dakota $77,871)
• Range: Mississippi $59,127 → Massachusetts $104,828 (DC is higher at $109,707, but it isn’t a state)

The tool shows your income as a percentage difference from your state's median: (your income − state median) / state median × 100.

State comparison is income-only. There are no official state medians for wealth, retirement, or savings — the SCF doesn't publish state-level cuts for any wealth measure. The tool says so rather than estimating them.

What the gap could look like over time

Illustrative assumed annual return: 7%. Not a forecast. The tool lets you switch between 4%, 7%, and 10%.

The gap-closer projects a monthly contribution forward with the same month-by-month math as the Figmetric compound growth tool: monthly contributions land at month end, and the annual return is converted to its monthly equivalent. It splits the result into "you put in" vs "growth," so you can see which of the two is doing the work.

For scale: $500/month for 30 years at an illustrative 7% grows to roughly $610,000 from $0 ($609,986 computed) — with $180,000 of it your own money and the rest growth. Raise the assumed return to 10% and it becomes about $1.13M; drop it to 4% and it's about $348,000. Same habit, three different assumed worlds.

What would break the illustration: returns are lumpy in real life, not smooth; fees, inflation, and taxes are real and not modeled here. This is a projection illustration, not financial advice.

National benchmarks: income, net worth, retirement

Read this before the tables: the income figures below are two different statistics from two different surveys in two different dollar vintages. They are not two versions of one number, so they live in separate blocks.

Block A — Census CPS ASEC 2026: median household money income

• $87,460 — median household money income, 2025 (2025 dollars). A record high since tracking began in 1967; +2.6% vs 2024.
• Median post-tax household income: $76,060 (+3.1% vs 2024).

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, "Income in the United States: 2025" (Current Population Reports P60-289, released Sept 15, 2026). "Money income" = pretax cash income, excludes in-kind transfers. Nationally representative — the official source for national income estimates.

Block B — Fed SCF 2022: median family income

• $70,300 (mean $141,900) — median family income, calendar-year 2021, in 2022 dollars.

Source: Federal Reserve, 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances bulletin. The Fed's "family" is a finance-centered unit (see methodology) — different survey design, different unit of analysis, different dollar vintage than Block A. Use Block B only where the SCF family concept is explicitly labeled.

Net worth — Fed SCF 2022, 2022 dollars, all families

• Median: $192,900 | Mean: $1,063,700 — 5.5× the median
• The distribution you were never shown (percentile breakpoints, all families): 10th: −$10 · 25th: $21,100 · 50th: $192,900 · 75th: $658,900 · 90th: $1,921,000
• Median net worth by age of reference person: under 35 $39,000 · 35–44 $135,600 · 45–54 $247,200 · 55–64 $364,200 · 65–74 $407,800 · 75+ $329,200
• Transaction savings: median $8,000 / mean $62,500 (conditional on holding; 98.6% of families hold)

Retirement accounts — read the framing, it's the whole point

• Retirement balances, conditional on holding, by age: under 35 $18,900 · 35–44 $45,000 · 45–54 $115,000 · 55–64 $185,000 · 65–74 $200,000 · 75+ $130,000 (Fed SCF 2022)
• Among holders, the mean ($334,000) is 3.8× the median ($86,900) — a smaller slice of large accounts pulls the average up.

What to do with this

Want to understand what could move the numbers? Run your numbers through the tool above — its "Explore your numbers" block matches Figmetric's calculators to your situation, framed as calculations, never advice.

Why the mean and the median disagree

The mean is pulled up by a small slice of very large values; the median is the person in the middle. That's the whole explanation — the examples just make it vivid:

• Income: mean ≈ 2.0× the median ($141,900 vs $70,300, SCF family income)
• Retirement accounts: mean 3.8× the median ($334,000 vs $86,900 — among holders only)
• Net worth: mean 5.5× the median ($1,063,700 vs $192,900)

The further the mean stretches above the median, the more concentrated the thing is. The headlines quote the average; the median is the honest number for "people like me."

How concentrated? The Federal Reserve's Distributional Financial Accounts (Q2 2026 release, updated Sept 18, 2026 — modeled forward from SCF 2022 using the quarterly Financial Accounts, not a fresh survey): the top 1% hold 31.6% of household net worth — a record high since the series began in 1989. The bottom 50% hold 2.5%. The top 10% hold 87% of corporate equities and mutual fund shares. The DFA publishes no medians, so it can't replace any figure above — it's context for why the averages look the way they do.

Methodology, sources & limitations

Every figure on this page carries four labels: source · vintage · definition · coverage.

Data sources

• Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances 2022 (SCF 2022) — nationally representative benchmark for wealth/retirement medians (income year 2021, 2022 dollars). Public microdata. The 2025 SCF was fielded in 2025 with summary results expected late 2026 — not yet available.
• Census Bureau Current Population Survey ASEC 2026 (P60-289, released Sept 15, 2026) — nationally representative benchmark for income (2025 income, 2025 dollars).
• Census Bureau ACS 1-year 2024 — state median household income (income only). The 2025 ACS 1-year release is delayed (disclosure-avoidance order; no release date set) — 2024 remains the latest official vintage.
• Vanguard How America Saves 2026 (plan-year 2025); Fidelity Q2 2026 — plan-participant benchmarks, separated from national figures.
• Fed Distributional Financial Accounts Q2 2026 (released Sept 18, 2026) — wealth-concentration figures; modeled forward from SCF 2022 via the Financial Accounts, not a fresh survey.

How the tool computes percentile ranges

• The tool maps your value into the band between adjacent published breakpoints — 10th/25th/50th/75th/90th by age band for net worth; the same breakpoints conditional-on-holding for retirement. No interpolation: the source data is survey breakpoints, not a continuous distribution, so "63rd percentile" would be false precision.
• The net-worth and retirement breakpoints were computed from the Fed's public SCF 2022 microdata (survey weights applied, all five imputation implicates pooled) and validated against the published bulletin medians: computed net-worth median $192,700 vs published $192,900; computed conditional retirement median $87,000 vs published $86,900; computed holder share 54.3% vs published 54.3%. Label in the tool as "computed from Federal Reserve SCF 2022 microdata."
• Net worth uses SCF variable NETWORTH (assets minus debts), all families in the age band — negatives included, so debt-heavy households get an honest rank. Retirement uses SCF RETQLIQ (IRAs/Keoghs + account-type retirement plans + other retirement accounts) conditional on holding; the 45.7% of families with no account take the no-account branch instead of the percentile scale.
• Age bands are by the SCF reference person's age — not "the median 30-year-old."

Definition honesty

• The Fed's SCF "family" = the economically dominant single person or couple plus all financially interdependent household members. This is NOT identical to the Census "household" (everyone in a housing unit) or the Census "family household" (householder + at least one related member). The mappings between them are approximate, not perfect — the page and tool say so explicitly.
• Net-worth and retirement age-band comparisons are SCF reference-person-age estimates regardless of your household-status selection — disclosed in each lens.
• State income comparisons use the overall state median only — no state-level wealth, retirement, savings, or household-type medians are published, so none are estimated.
• Household-type income comparisons are national-only (CPS). Where no clean cut exists (married-with-children, single-parent, unmarried partnered), the tool shows the nearest official benchmark and labels the fallback — never silently.

Limitations

Survey sampling error; SCF is triennial (2022 latest published); retirement medians describe holders only; projections are illustrative, not forecasts; not financial advice.

Related research

We also published a 50-state study on how minimum payments trap borrowers:

• The Minimum-Payment Trap, 50 States Ranked — we ran the average $6,600 credit-card balance at 22% APR through minimum payments in all 50 states.
• Full methodology for the 50-state study — every assumption, formula, and data source.
• Download the study dataset (CSV)