989 people, 4.8% of the country's net worth.
Forbes valued America's billionaires at $8.4T on March 1, 2026. The Federal Reserve put the net worth of every US household combined at $174.0T at the end of that quarter. The ratio is the headline; the trend and the comparison groups are below.
Billionaires' slice of household wealth has roughly doubled since 2010.
US billionaires' combined Forbes net worth has gone from 2.3% of all US household wealth in 2010 to about 4.8% in 2026, and most of that move is recent: the share sat at 3.2% as late as 2023. In dollar terms the billionaire total, $8.4 trillion, is roughly a third of what the Fed's top 0.1% of households hold, up from about a fifth in 2010, and roughly twice the bottom half's share of 2.5%. Two caveats. Forbes counts US citizens as of about March 1 while the Fed measures the household sector as of March 31, so read the share to one decimal and no further. And the ratio to the bottom 50% is not a new crossing — billionaire wealth exceeds it in all 17 years here, dipping to a low of 1.25x in 2023 before rebounding.
Each March list is matched to the Fed's first-quarter figures for the same year. Because the $1 billion bar is not inflation-adjusted, part of the rise is more people clearing it: holding the count at 2010's 403 richest Americans, the share still goes from 2.3% to 4.1%. The Distributional Financial Accounts' top 0.1% is about 130,000 households; the Forbes list is under a thousand people.
Billionaires have out-held the bottom half of households every year since 2010: 6.1× at the 2011 peak, 1.25× in 2023, 2.0× now.
The bottom half's balance sheet was still crushed by the housing bust in 2010–2011 — $321B in 2010 — so this ratio is mostly a story about a tiny denominator recovering, not about billionaires. The bottom half's recovery narrowed it to 1.25× in 2023; the AI-era rally has since pushed it back toward 2×. The share of all household wealth, above, is the cleaner measure of concentration.
| Year | US billionaires | Their net worth | All households | Share | × bottom 50% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 403 | $1.35T | $59.5T | 2.3% | 4.20 |
| 2011 | 412 | $1.53T | $63.4T | 2.4% | 6.05 |
| 2012 | 424 | $1.64T | $65.2T | 2.5% | 5.72 |
| 2013 | 442 | $1.87T | $70.7T | 2.6% | 4.06 |
| 2014 | 492 | $2.32T | $77.9T | 3.0% | 3.30 |
| 2015 | 535 | $2.56T | $83.5T | 3.1% | 2.93 |
| 2016 | 541 | $2.40T | $85.9T | 2.8% | 2.34 |
| 2017 | 566 | $2.76T | $91.9T | 3.0% | 2.27 |
| 2018 | 586 | $3.10T | $98.9T | 3.1% | 2.10 |
| 2019 | 607 | $3.11T | $103.1T | 3.0% | 1.93 |
| 2020 | 615 | $2.95T | $103.0T | 2.9% | 1.56 |
| 2021 | 724 | $4.40T | $128.6T | 3.4% | 1.48 |
| 2022 | 735 | $4.70T | $143.9T | 3.3% | 1.29 |
| 2023 | 735 | $4.49T | $139.0T | 3.2% | 1.25 |
| 2024 | 813 | $5.70T | $153.6T | 3.7% | 1.49 |
| 2025 | 902 | $6.75T | $161.1T | 4.2% | 1.70 |
| 2026 | 989 | $8.42T | $174.0T | 4.8% | 1.97 |
Forbes values US citizens as of ~March 1 each year; the Fed's Financial Accounts measure the US household (and nonprofit) sector as of March 31. Citizenship and household residency are not the same population, so shares are reported to one decimal at most. Moving to a residence basis where Forbes records one (dropping 19 citizens living abroad, adding 43 foreign citizens living in the US) makes the 2026 share 4.9% instead of 4.8%. The Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts distribute Z.1 totals using the Survey of Consumer Finances, which deliberately excludes the Forbes 400 from its sample; the top-0.1% figure is therefore built without most of the people it is compared with here. More on the matching and its limits on the methods page.