America's Poorest Only Own 6% of Assets

The poorest 50 percent of Americans owned just 5.9 percent of the country’s total assets in Q2 of 2023, according to data from the U.S. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

As the following chart shows, the share of wealth as total assets remained at a low 5.9 percent through the first two quarters of this year, having seen a downtick from 6 percent at the end of 2022. Since 1989, the peak share of assets held by this group was in Q2 and Q3 of 1995, when it reached just 8.7 percent.

By contrast, data shows that the top 0.1 percent (99.9th to 100th wealth percentiles) of the U.S. held 11.4 percent of total assets in Q2 of 2023 - more than double that of the lowest 50 percent.