Since the start of the second Trump administration, the wealth gap between the richest Americans and the bottom half of the country has widened considerably. (see Figure 1) During three consecutive quarters in 2025, the share of total wealth held by the top 0.1 percent and the top 1 percent reached the highest levels on record since the Federal Reserve started tracking these data in 1989, with the latest data from 2026 showing it just below those peaks. Since the fourth quarter of 2024, the share of overall wealth held by the top 1 percent has grown from 31 percent to 31.6 percent, while the bottom half’s share has remained at a stagnant 2.5 percent. This gap has been driven wider by things such as soaring stock values and tax policy changes in the congressional Republican-passed Big Beautiful Bill that favor the wealthy, as well as persistently high debts for the middle and bottom of the wealth distribution. New Center for American Progress analysis of the Federal Reserve Board’s Distributional Financial Accounts shows that from the fourth quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of 2026:
- Households in the top 1 percent of the wealth distribution saw their net worth increase by an average of $1.8 million per household.
- Households in the top 0.1 percent of the wealth distribution saw their net worth increase by an average of $9.6 million per household.
- Households in the bottom 50 percent of the wealth distribution saw their net worth increase by roughly $1,200 per household.
Since Trump took office, the ultrawealthy (top 0.1 percent) gained more than 8,000 times as much wealth per household as those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution.
In other words, since Trump took office, the ultrawealthy (top 0.1 percent) gained more than 8,000 times as much wealth per household as those in the bottom half of the wealth distribution. To provide an example of the extremity and exponential nature of wealth inequality in the United States, the 10 wealthiest Americans alone saw their real fortunes grow by a combined $259 billion over the same period, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index—about $26 billion per person, or 22 million times more than the bottom half’s $1,200 per household.
Household wealth percentile groups in Q1 2026, by the numbers
Top 0.1%
$64 million+
Survey of Consumer Finances. See Methodology for more.
99%–99.9%
$15 million–$64 million
Survey of Consumer Finances. See Methodology for more.
90%–99%
$2.7 million–$15 million
Survey of Consumer Finances. See Methodology for more.
50%–90%
$286,000–$2.7 million
Survey of Consumer Finances. See Methodology for more.
Bottom 50%
Less than $286,000
Survey of Consumer Finances. See Methodology for more.
Examining the components of wealth
Wealth is measured by subtracting total liabilities from total assets. Examples of assets include home equity, investments in the stock market through corporate equities and mutual funds, defined contribution and defined benefit pensions, and private business ownership. Examples of liabilities, which the authors interchangeably call “debt” throughout this section, include consumer credit, home mortgages, and depository institution loans.
Assets
Despite comprising nearly 68 million households, the bottom half of the distribution only holds 5 percent of the aggregate assets. In comparison, the top 10 percent holds about two-thirds of the aggregate assets. (see Figure 2) Furthermore, the distribution of the components of wealth varies dramatically by wealth percentile group. The ultrawealthy (top 0.1 percent) tend to hold the majority of their assets—71 percent in the first quarter of 2026—in corporate stock and private business, and that has only become more concentrated in terms of both the share of overall stock and business assets nationally and among the ultrawealthy themselves during the second Trump administration.
Since the end of 2024, the top 0.1 percent’s real wealth from corporate stock and private businesses has increased by $1.35 trillion, or by about $9.9 million on average per household. These business assets have been driving the top of the distribution’s overall wealth growth during this time. Corporations and private businesses were the recipients of $100 billion in tax cuts in fiscal year 2025 alone from the Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). Businesses, their owners, and their investors are also slated to receive about $2 trillion in total tax cuts over a decade from the OBBBA. The value of business ownership depends partially on future expectations of profits after taxes, so past economic evidence suggests that the OBBBA tax cuts were at least partially responsible for the growth for wealthy business owners over the past year.
In contrast, households in the bottom half of the distribution, including those with negative net worth, hold the bulk of their assets in real estate (about 47 percent) and consumer durables (20 percent), such as cars, jewelry, and home appliances. Yet since the end of 2024, the bottom half’s asset holdings have shifted away from real estate toward consumer durables—a concerning trend, given that consumer durables such as cars have a higher likelihood of depreciating over time than housing, which tends to appreciate over time.
The composition of the lower 50 percent’s wealth also particularly exposes those households to Trump administration policy changes. Unlike for business income, for which the administration has been decreasing taxes, the administration’s tariff policies have been increasing taxes on housing components and consumer durable goods, directly hitting the assets disproportionately held by less-wealthy Americans. Furthermore, the Trump administration’s plans to allow risky investments such as crypto and private equity to be made in 401(k) plans may spell trouble for the future since those in the bottom half of the distribution (if they are invested in the stock market at all) tend to hold their assets in defined contribution plans such as 401(k) plans.
Liabilities
On the other side of the ledger are debts. While real liabilities have declined overall across most groups since the COVID-19 pandemic recession (see Figure 3), changes in debt among some groups may be driving how people are feeling financially. Expressed in real terms, households in the 50th–90th percentile of the wealth distribution held about as much debt in aggregate ($8.8 trillion in the first quarter of 2026) as they did during the housing bubble leading to the Great Recession, which peaked around 2006 to 2007. Those in the 90th–99th percentile, meanwhile, held real debt levels of $4.1 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, above their Great Recession highs. The bottom half of households by wealth percentile have not reached Great Recession highs but still have substantially more debt than they did leading into the housing bubble of the early to mid-2000s; from the beginning of 2002 to the end of 2005, their real debt averaged $5.2 trillion, while the latest 2026 data show that they hold $6.1 trillion. In contrast, the top 1 percent did not experience the same dramatic boom-bust cycle over the previous two recessions in their liabilities, which have remained very low, especially in relation to their overall assets.
Conclusion
Business and stock market trends have lifted the portfolios of the ultrawealthy to new highs. However, other American households have not seen such extreme growth from the bullish market of the past few years. The assets of the bottom half, which are largely held in housing, have seen flattening growth in recent years after the housing price run-up following the COVID-19 recession. These trends, combined with the OBBBA tax cuts for businesses and investors, threaten to further widen the wealth disparity between the rich and the middle class. The Trump administration’s plans that would permit greater risk in ordinary Americans’ retirement accounts may contribute to widening disparities in the future, making it all the more difficult for working- and middle-class Americans to keep pace.
Methodological appendix
The authors used the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts (DFA) data broken out by wealth percentile groups to conduct this analysis. Individual asset and liability categories were adjusted for inflation using quarterly averages of the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), indexed to a base of the first quarter of 2026. October 2025’s monthly CPI-U value was missing due to the federal government shutdown, so the authors estimated it as the average of September and November 2025. The overall wealth figure was also divided by household counts from the DFA over time to provide an accurate estimate of the overall real wealth change per household. All references to changes since the Trump administration took office were produced by calculating the change between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2026, the latest available data.
Net-worth cutoffs from the Survey of Consumer Finances (an input to estimate the distribution within the DFA) were estimated by projecting forward based on the average real rate of wealth growth per household. Because net-worth cutoffs are only available in the distributional data from the most recently fielded Survey of Consumer Finances, the authors projected from the third quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2026.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index data were adjusted for inflation using monthly CPI-U data because the data are not collected quarterly like the other statistics in this column. When the reported data points in the index did not fall on the last day of each quarter (fourth quarter of 2024 compared to the first quarter of 2026), the authors chose the closest data point that included the full quarter’s reporting.