Trends in Family Wealth, 1989 to 2013

"In 2013, aggregate family wealth in the United States was $67 trillion (or about four times the nation’s gross domestic product) and the median family (the one at the midpoint of the wealth distribution) held approximately $81,000, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. For this analysis, CBO calculated that measure of wealth as a family’s assets minus its debt. CBO measured wealth as marketable wealth, which consists of assets that are easily tradable and that have value even after the death of their owner. Those assets include home equity, other real estate (net of real estate loans), financial securities, bank deposits, defined contribution pension accounts, and business equity. Debt is nonmortgage debt, including credit card debt, auto loans, and student loans, for example..."
Family wealth

Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S.: 2000 to 2011

"Household net worth, or wealth, is an important indicator of  economic well-being in the United  States. Median household net  worth decreased by $5,046, or 6.8
percent, between 2000 and  2011..."
Household wealth

An Analysis of the Distribution of Wealth Across Households, 1989-2010

"The distribution of wealth (net worth) across households has been an underlying consideration in
congressional deliberations on various issues, including taxation and social welfare. This report
analyzes the change over time in the concentration of net worth (assets minus liabilities) to help
inform those policy deliberations.

According to data from the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), mean
household net worth was $498,800 and median household net worth was $77,300 in 2010.The
median is the value at which one-half of wealth-owners have lower values and one-half have
higher values of wealth. It is a better indication of the wealth of the “typical” household than is
the mean which, because of the way in which it is calculated, is greatly affected by the small
number of households with high values of wealth. A mean over six times a median suggests
substantial concentration of wealth among households at the upper end of the wealth distribution..."

Wealth and Asset Ownership

Find statistics on the median value of assets for households by type of asset owned and selected other characteristics. These figures are subdivided to display assets by race and Hispanic origin of householder, age of householder, and education attainment of householder.

Retirement Savings and Household Wealth in 2007
"About half of all workers in the United States participate in an employer-sponsored retirement plan of some kind, a proportion that has remained relatively stable over the past thirty years. Beginning in the early 1980s, however, employers began to move away from traditional pension plans – also known as defined benefit (DB) plans – to defined contribution (DC) plans, like those authorized under section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code. Unlike DB plans, which are required by federal law to offer a benefit in the form of a life annuity, DC plans are individual accounts that typically pay the employee a lump sum at retirement. In 2007, approximately 21 million workers in the private sector participated in defined benefit plans, while more than 40
million workers participated in defined contribution plans..."