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Your scenario
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Percentile (share at or below)
—- Strictly below your balance
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- At the same balance
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- Strictly above your balance
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- Selected group median
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Compare your balance across age groups
Retirement accounts — all families
| Reference-person age | Group median | At or below your balance |
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Calculated from the selected measure and population. Figures are survey estimates, not savings targets.
Retirement savings and net worth measure different things
Retirement accounts: use the family’s total balances in IRAs, Keogh accounts and account-type employer retirement plans covered by the SCF RETQLIQ variable. This measure excludes the present value of Social Security and defined-benefit pension promises. It also excludes ordinary taxable investment accounts and home equity.
Net worth: add financial and nonfinancial assets and subtract debts. This includes retirement accounts, home equity, vehicles and business interests. If you enter home equity, do not subtract the mortgage a second time. Negative net worth is supported.
Two families can have the same net worth but very different accessible retirement portfolios. A family with $600,000 of home equity and $400,000 of investments has the same $1 million net worth as one with $200,000 of home equity and $800,000 of investments. Only the invested amounts belong in a simple portfolio withdrawal calculation. Use the 4% rule calculator to explore income separately.
Data, weighting and limitations
Source vintage: Federal Reserve SCF 2025, released October 9, 2026. Dollar values are in 2025 dollars; the tool does not automatically inflate them to today’s purchasing power. The public extract contains 4,360 distinct families and five imputed records per family. It measures families, not individual Americans.
For each measure, age group and population, we normalize survey weights within each of the five implicates, calculate the weighted empirical cumulative distribution, and average those five distributions. The headline gives the share at or below the entered balance. The median is the first value where that averaged distribution reaches 50%. No interpolation or artificial upper-tail cutoff is applied.
These are FinancialDepth point estimates from public data, not official Fed percentile cutoffs. Public disclosure adjustments, sampling variation and the choice of estimator can cause differences from published figures. We do not use replicate weights to calculate confidence intervals. Extreme wealth and small age subsets are especially uncertain. A rank is not evidence that a retirement plan is adequately funded.
As a basic cross-check, the public extract gives a retirement-account median of $106,000 among account owners and a net-worth median of $216,100 across all families using this method. Including families without accounts reduces the retirement-account median to $5,000. Changing the population changes the question being answered.
Frequently asked questions
Does changing age change the percentile?
Yes. Both the percentile and median use the selected age group, based on the SCF family reference person. An age group is not a retirees-only group.
Should I enter my 401(k) or my net worth?
Choose retirement accounts and add all applicable family retirement-account balances, not just one 401(k). Choose net worth for all assets minus debts, including home equity and retirement accounts.
Why does a zero balance have a nonzero percentile?
The headline is the estimated share at or below your balance, including ties. Many families report zero retirement-account balances. The separate below and same-balance figures show this distinction.
Is this an official Federal Reserve calculator?
No. FinancialDepth computes point estimates from the Fed’s public SCF extract. It averages five weighted empirical distributions and does not calculate survey-design confidence intervals or reproduce the Fed’s internal data.
Turn the comparison into a spending plan
Use Can I retire on this amount? for portfolio income examples, spending by age for budget context, and How long will my money last? to test depletion. A peer comparison is one input, not a plan.
Calculator and interpretation by FinancialDepth. See our methodology and limitations.