Published October 9, 2026. U.S. families entered 2025 with somewhat higher typical income and wealth than three years earlier, but debt burdens and missed payments worsened for the most leveraged households, according to the Federal Reserve’s newly released Survey of Consumer Finances.
The triennial survey is one of the Federal Reserve’s most detailed looks at family balance sheets. It measures assets, debts, income, pensions and demographic characteristics across the distribution, including an oversample of wealthy households.
What the Federal Reserve found
- Real median family income rose 7% from the 2022 survey to $82,200, while real mean income fell 6% to $145,200.
- Real median net worth increased 2% to $215,900. Real mean net worth rose 7% to $1.24 million.
- The total debt-to-income ratio increased from 89.4% in 2022 to 94.9% in 2025.
- The median debt-payment-to-income ratio rose 2 percentage points to 15.4%.
- Among families whose debt payments consumed more than 40% of income, the share reporting that they were behind on loan payments jumped from about 12% to almost 20%. More than 8% said they were at least two months late, up from 5% in 2022.
The income figures refer to the year before the survey: real median income rose from $76,900 in 2021 to $82,200 in 2024. That timing matters because the results are a structural snapshot, not a real-time reading of household finances in October 2026.
Housing wealth improved, but ownership barely changed
The homeownership rate was 66% in 2025, roughly unchanged from 2022. For homeowners, median net housing value—the home’s value minus mortgage and other home-secured debt—rose to $230,000 from $218,900.
Those gains helped lift typical net worth, but they did not erase the strain visible in payment ratios. Higher interest rates on mortgages and consumer loans likely contributed to the increase in debt-service burdens, the Fed said.
Why the median and mean tell different stories
The median represents the family at the midpoint, while the mean is pulled upward by very high-income or high-wealth families. The combination of rising median income and falling mean income indicates that the changes were not uniform across the distribution. The Fed said families near the lower ends of the income and wealth distributions saw modest income gains, while those near the upper ends experienced declines.
The new report adds longer-term context to AskNovus’s coverage of weaker October consumer sentiment and slower consumer-credit growth. Those releases measure different things and should not be read as direct substitutes for the Fed’s balance-sheet survey.
Primary sources
Read the Federal Reserve’s October 9 press release and the complete 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances report.
Featured image: Jimmy Dean/Unsplash.