--- title: America's Billionaires Hold More Wealth Than the Bottom 57% of U.S. Households description: U.S. billionaires hold $6.7 trillion in wealth — more than the bottom half of American households combined, new data shows. authors: - name: Pete Grieve role: Lead News Reporter url: https://money.com/author/pete-grieve/ bio: Pete Grieve is a personal finance reporter at Money who frequently writes about news and trends related to car buying, auto insurance and gas prices. education: University of Chicago, BA Political Science at_money_since: 2022 articles: 603 covers: - Personal Finance - Banking - Business - Career Advice - Credit - Credit Cards - Debt - Economy and Politics - Education - Health and Wellness - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Professional Services - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes social: - https://twitter.com/pete_grieve - https://linkedin.com/in/pete-grieve-b5aa02138 - https://www.facebook.com/petegrieve4 - name: Adam Hardy role: Lead Data Reporter url: https://money.com/author/adam-hardy/ bio: Adam Hardy is a lead data journalist at Money, where he frequently reports on financial barriers that affect low-income Americans. Adam’s work has also appeared in Business Insider, Forbes, Nasdaq, The Penny Hoarder, Yahoo! Finance and more than a dozen local and regional newspapers. education: University of South Florida, BA, Magazine Journalism at_money_since: 2021 articles: 503 covers: - Personal Finance - Banking - Business - Career Advice - Credit - Credit Cards - Debt - Economy and Politics - Education - Health and Wellness - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Pets - Professional Services - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes - Technology also_seen_in: - The Penny Hoarder - Forbes Advisor - Creative Loafing - The New York Times - The Washington Post - Bloomberg - Harvard Law School - The Federal Register - National Consumer Law Center - CBS News - Becker's Hospital Review - Business Insider - Mother Jones - The Week - Fortune - The Philadelphia Inquirer - National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NAFSAA) - Education Advisory Board (EAB) - The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS) - This Morning with Gordon Deal - Empower - Reddit social: - https://www.x.com/hardyjournalism - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hardyjournalism/ editors: - name: Kaitlin Mulhere role: Editor url: https://money.com/author/kaitlin-mulhere/ bio: Kaitlin Mulhere has been covering the intersection of college and personal finance since 2015. She enjoys breaking down the complexities of college costs and financial aid, and she also runs Money’s Best Colleges. education: University of Florida at_money_since: 2015 articles: 217 covers: - Personal Finance - Banking - Business - Career Advice - Credit - Credit Cards - Debt - Economy and Politics - Education - Health and Wellness - Housing - Identity Theft - Insurance - Investing - Lifestyle - Loans - Mortgages - Retirement - Shopping - Taxes social: - https://twitter.com/KMulhere - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaitlin-mulhere-64503048/ published: '2026-09-23T19:30:12.000Z' modified: '2026-09-23T19:30:12.000Z' section: Personal Finance tags: - News word_count: 686 canonical: https://money.com/us-billionaires-wealth-vs-bottom-half-americans/ type: NewsArticle source: structured-blocks --- > **Disclosure:** We research all brands listed and may earn a fee from our partners. Research and financial considerations may influence how brands are displayed. Not all brands are included. [Learn more](https://money.com/page/disclaimer/). ![Big piggy bank vs Smaller piggy banks](https://img.money.com/2026/09/News-billionaires.jpg) America's billionaires collectively hold $6.7 trillion in wealth, which is significantly more than the bottom half of U.S. households combined. The United States has more billionaires than any other country by far, according to the 2026 [billionaire census](https://altrata.com/reports/billionaire-census-2026) from Altrata released earlier this month. The 1,265 U.S. billionaires account for roughly one-third of the global total of 3,795 and outnumber those in the next seven countries combined. All told, U.S. billionaires control just under half of global billionaire wealth, which totaled $15.1 trillion in 2025. ![countries with the most billionaires chart](https://img.money.com/2026/09/Money-Chart-billionaires2026-1.png) ## U.S. billionaires are wealthier than the bottom 57% The wealth of these 1,265 American billionaires — $6,688,000,000,000 — is such a large number that it's hard to comprehend. Here's one way to put it in context: Compared to the $6.7 trillion combined net worth of U.S. billionaires, Federal Reserve data shows that the bottom half of the country has a total net worth of $4.3 trillion. That number includes Americans in debt, meaning their net worth is negative. About 13 million households have [negative net worth](https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/thirteen-million-us-households-have-negative-net-worth-will-they-ever-move-from-debt-to-wealth/), which brings down the bottom half's combined wealth. What exact segment of the population would you have to include to match the share of wealth held by U.S. billionaires? By our math, it's about the bottom 57% of households. Put differently, U.S. billionaires control the equivalent of 3.84% of total household wealth, while the bottom 57% of American households own approximately that same share. This display of the country's wealth inequality comes at a time when the richest 1% own the the biggest share of the country's wealth in [more than 30 years](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-wealth-gap-widest-in-three-decades-federal-reserve/). One thing to note: Altrata's report does not count a country's billionaires based on citizenship or residency. Instead, the firm uses the billionaire's primary business address to determine their location, the methodology explains, so it's possible some of the 1,265 U.S. billionaires are not actually American. To account for that, Money ran the same analysis on Forbes' latest list of U.S. billionaires, which is based on residence. The results are just as striking: U.S. billionaires — worth a collective $8.4 trillion by Forbes' wealth estimates as of early 2026 — hold more wealth than the bottom 60% of Americans. That level of wealth inequality is "unhealthy" for U.S. economy and society, Steven Durlauf, director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility and the [University of Chicago](https://money.com/best-colleges/profile/university-of-chicago/), tells Money. Often, proposal to curtail U.S. wealth inequality involve progressive taxation on billionaires and corporations. Opponents of these options argue that such intervention [could end up hurting the economy](https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/failures-wealth-taxation), but Durlauf suggests that's no guarantee. "Successful economic growth and innovation can be preserved with much smaller disparities," he says. Money's findings are based on a [Lorenz wealth distribution analysis](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/glossary/lorenz-curve/) that compared the wealth held by U.S. billionaires with that of ordinary American households using data from the Federal Reserve. We used the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances to map how wealth is distributed across households by percentile. Because the survey measured wealth as of 2022, we then applied that distribution to updated U.S. wealth estimates using the Fed's latest Distributional Financial Accounts release. This allowed us to align each report's billionaire wealth snapshot with timely federal wealth data (Altrata in 2025 and Forbes in 2026). ## Altrata reports a record number of billionaires The world's billionaire population reached an all-time high in this edition of Altrata's report, which captures a snapshot of global wealth at the end of 2025. The wealth intelligence firm's report cited economic gains from artificial intelligence as a driver of growth in the number of billionaires worldwide. "Annual growth of 8.2% was the strongest in five years, capping a decade in which this exclusive population has expanded by almost 60%," Altrata reported. The report describes the billionaire population as "predominantly male and aged over 70." The average age of a billionaire globally is 71; only 13% of billionaires are women. The growth in billionaires was even greater in the U.S. at 11.5%. That's due to the strength in the tech economy. 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