Why 'average net worth' is usually the wrong number
Search for average net worth by age and you will find figures inflated by a simple statistical trick: means. A handful of billionaires drags the average far above what a typical household actually has. In the US 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the mean family net worth was over one million dollars while the median — the household exactly in the middle — was about 193,000 dollars. The median is the honest benchmark, and it is the one this page uses.
The second trap is precision theater: sites publishing exact net worth percentiles for countries that have never run a household wealth survey. For the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Singapore, no official net-worth-by-age distribution exists. Anyone quoting one invented it. We refuse to — instead, we give you well-sourced medians where they exist and clearly-labeled rules of thumb where they don't.
The official numbers: US Federal Reserve medians
The US is the gold standard for household wealth data. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), run every three years, measured these median family net worths in 2022 (published October 2023): under 35: 39,040 dollars; 35 to 44: 135,600; 45 to 54: 247,200; 55 to 64: 364,500; 65 to 74: 409,900; 75 and over: 335,600.
Notice the shape: net worth roughly triples between the under-35 and 35-44 bands, and peaks in the 65-74 band before drawing down in retirement. If you compare yourself against these numbers, remember they are households, not individuals, they include home equity, and they are 2022 dollars.
The UK: one solid national median
The UK's Office for National Statistics runs the Wealth and Assets Survey, which put the median household total wealth in Great Britain at 302,500 pounds for the April 2018 to March 2020 round — including property, private pensions, physical and financial wealth. Pension wealth is the largest single component, which surprises many people comparing their bank balances against it.
The ONS also publishes wealth by age band in the same survey. We deliberately show only the national median in the widget — but the pattern is the same as the US: wealth peaks in the decade before state pension age at several times the level of households in their thirties.
UAE, Saudi Arabia and Singapore: what data exists (and what doesn't)
None of the three publishes an official household net-worth-by-age distribution. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have young, majority-expatriate or fast-changing populations where global wealth reports publish only country-level means and medians per adult — Singapore's median wealth per adult is estimated at roughly 100,000 US dollars in recent UBS Global Wealth Report editions, among the highest in the world — and even those are modeled estimates, not census data.
For GCC expats the honest benchmark is different anyway: you are typically mid-career, saving tax-free, and your wealth is split across home-country property, GCC bank accounts and end-of-service accruals. Salary-multiple targets travel across borders far better than any single country's percentile table, which is why they are the default for these countries in the widget.
The classic targets: 1x by 30, 10x by 67
The most-used milestone framework comes from Fidelity's retirement savings guideline: aim for 1x your annual salary saved by 30, 2x by 35, 3x by 40, 4x by 45, 6x by 50, 7x by 55, 8x by 60 and 10x by 67. We interpolate between those anchors so your exact age gets an exact multiple. Strictly, Fidelity frames this as retirement savings; applied to total net worth it is a slightly generous but directionally sound yardstick.
The older cousin is the formula from The Millionaire Next Door (Stanley and Danko, 1996): expected net worth = age x pre-tax annual income / 10. It is brutal on young high earners — a 28-year-old on 200,000 has almost no time to have compounded 560,000 — so treat it as a mid-career gauge, not a graduation exam. If the two benchmarks disagree, the truth for your situation is usually somewhere between them.
How to actually move the number
Benchmarks are only useful if they change behavior. The three levers, in order of power: your savings rate (the single biggest driver before 40), your investment allocation (the biggest driver after 40, when the portfolio outweighs annual savings), and lifestyle inflation — every raise you fully spend resets your multiple to zero growth.
And you cannot manage what you do not measure. Net worth is scattered by design — bank accounts, brokers, property, pensions, end-of-service accruals, often across countries and currencies. NOVOX pulls all of it into one live net worth, tracks the trend, and shows your multiple improving month by month. That feedback loop is worth more than any percentile table.