The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances puts the median net worth of a homeowning family at $396,200 and the median net worth of a renting family at $10,400. [1] Both figures are in 2022 dollars, from the 2022 wave of the survey. The difference is $385,800.
The ratio is about 38 to 1. That is the number that gets quoted, and it is the wrong number to watch.
Here is the right one. In 2019, in the same inflation-adjusted dollars, homeowners' median net worth was $295,500 and renters' was $7,300. [1] Over the three years to 2022, renters' median net worth rose 42 percent. Homeowners' rose 34 percent. Renters had the better percentage, by eight points.
Run it in dollars. Forty-two percent of $7,300 is $3,100. Thirty-four percent of $295,500 is $100,700. The gap went from $288,200 to $385,800. Renters won the rate and lost $97,600 of ground. [1]
That is what a compounding asset does to a distribution. It is not a story about who saved harder.
The Urban Institute, working the same series, reached the headline finding: "In 2022, both the median and average wealth gaps have reached historic highs since the data were first collected in 1989." [2] Its median gap, almost $390,000, and its average gap, over $1,370,000, line up with what the Fed's own Table 2 produces on subtraction: $385,800 and $1,376,000. [1][2] Two independent tabulations of the same survey landing within a few thousand dollars is about as solid as a distributional number gets.
One caveat on "widest ever," and it is a real one. The Survey of Consumer Finances runs every three years. The most recent completed wave is 2022, published in October 2023 and analysed by Urban in April 2024. NPR reports the next wave is expected later this year. [3] The record is a 2022 reading of a series that began in 1989. Nothing in it covers 2026.
What has happened since is not in the series, and it is not in dispute either. The median US home price hit $440,600 this summer, a record, with prices up more than 50 percent in six years. NPR reports that 77 percent of listings are now out of reach for middle-income earners and that nearly half of renters are cost-burdened, paying more than a third of their income for housing. [3]
The financing side moved this week. Freddie Mac's average 30-year fixed rate reached 6.66 percent in the week of 30 July, up from 6.58 percent the week before and the highest since 31 July 2025, when it stood at 6.72 percent. [4] The precision matters there: the rate is at a one-year high and is still a few basis points below where it sat a year ago. The 15-year averaged 6.04 percent. Mortgage applications fell 6.4 percent week over week, and seasonally adjusted home sales for January through June ran just 0.7 percent above the same stretch of last year. [4]
We reported the wage side of the same squeeze this morning: total compensation growth is flat at 3.4 percent against 3.7 percent inflation.
Put the three together. Entry price at a record, financing at a one-year high, pay losing to prices. The same appreciation that carried a median homeowner from $295,500 to $396,200 is the appreciation pricing out the people trying to get in, because those are not two processes. They are one process seen from either side of the door.
Mechele Dickerson, a housing researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, put the mechanism in a sentence: "Most middle class families have most of their wealth in their homes. For young adults who are middle class, they are facing a future of no wealth." [3] On where that lands next, she added: "What's disconcerting for me is we're ending up in this space where if you're okay, it may be because your parents were okay." [3]
Jung Hyun Choi of the Urban Institute, one of the authors of the 2024 analysis, made the transmission explicit. "Housing wealth also transfers to future generations," she told NPR. [3] Brittany Gilroy, 35, who has rented the same place for nearly four years, described the entry problem from the other end: "If you want to make a dive into buying a house, you're going into the deep end. There is no kiddie pool of a starter home." [3]
The federal position is on the record and it is not ambiguous. At a cabinet meeting in January, President Trump said: "I don't want to drive housing prices down. People that own their homes, we're gonna keep them wealthy." [3]
That is a policy of holding the numerator. The $396,200 and the $10,400 are the two ends of one appreciation, and keeping the first rising is the same act as leaving the second where it is. The next Survey of Consumer Finances will say by how much.
