The Wealth Gap Nobody in Washington Wants to Close

The richest 1 percent of American households now hold $55 trillion in wealth — roughly the same amount owned by the entire bottom 90 percent of the country, combined.

A Record Nobody Wants Their Name On

Every quarter the Federal Reserve publishes its Distributional Financial Accounts, a bloodless spreadsheet of a document that quietly tracks who owns what in America. In the third quarter of 2025, it showed the top 1 percent controlling 31.7 percent of all household wealth in the country — the highest share recorded since the Fed started measuring this in 1989. Not the highest in a decade. The highest, full stop, in the 36 years anyone has bothered to count.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, put it about as plainly as an economist ever does: household wealth “is highly concentrated and becoming steadily more concentrated.” That’s not a hot take. That’s a chart with an arrow that only points one direction.

The Bottom Half Isn’t Just Behind — It’s Shrinking

In 1989, the bottom 50 percent of American households held 3.4 percent of the nation’s wealth. That was never a lot. But by 2024 it had fallen to 2.5 percent — a decline of roughly a quarter in relative terms, over a period in which the U.S. economy more than tripled in size. In between, the bottom half briefly cratered to a record-low 0.4 percent of national wealth in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash, a stretch when the single largest asset most working-class families owned — their home — became a liability instead. It has since recovered, but only back to a number that was already thin to begin with.

Meanwhile the top 10 percent of households now account for nearly half of all consumer spending in the country. Read that again: the group buying the cars, the vacations, the appliances, the restaurant meals that show up in GDP reports isn’t a cross-section of America. It’s a decile. When economists talk about the health of the American consumer, they’re increasingly describing the spending habits of people who don’t represent the median household at all.

“We keep measuring the economy by how the top decile is doing, because that’s where the spending — and increasingly, the whole economy — actually lives.”

Wages Aren’t Closing the Gap Either

If wage growth were fixing this, the wealth numbers might at least be stabilizing. They’re not. As of December 2025, higher-income households saw wage growth around 3 percent year over year. Middle-income households: 1.5 percent. Low-income households: 1.1 percent — a rate that, after inflation, is barely growth at all. The people with the least ground to make up are gaining it back the slowest, which is exactly backwards from what would need to happen for the gap to narrow rather than widen.

Stock ownership tells the same story from a different angle. Eighty-seven percent of Americans who own stock live in households earning $100,000 or more a year. The most reliable wealth-building tool of the last half-century — a rising stock market — simply isn’t something most of the country has meaningful exposure to. When the market has a great year, it’s a great year for a fraction of the population and a headline for everyone else.

Why Nobody in Washington Is Rushing to Fix It

There’s no shortage of policy levers that could, in theory, bend this curve — wealth taxes, estate tax reform, expanded retirement-savings access, housing policy that treats homeownership as attainable rather than aspirational. What there is a shortage of is political appetite, on either side of the aisle, to actually pull one hard enough to matter. Wealth concentration doesn’t generate the kind of acute crisis that forces a legislative response. It just grinds forward, quarter after quarter, Fed report after Fed report, until a generation wakes up owning less, relative to the country around it, than their parents did.

The Index tracks wealth concentration because it’s upstream of almost everything else on this site — housing affordability, family formation, trust in institutions. A country where the top 1 percent owns as much as the bottom 90 percent combined isn’t a country with a temporary imbalance. It’s a country whose economic architecture has quietly been rebuilt around a much smaller group of people, one Fed report at a time.