How to Read the Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts — Wealth Shares, Groups and Model-Based Quarters

As of 26 October 2026 (KST); most recent data: the Federal Reserve Board's Distributional Financial Accounts with data through the second quarter of 2026; the overview page shows "Last Update: September 18, 2026", following the Financial Accounts (Z.1) release of September 11, 2026. The DFA pages do not give a date for the next DFA update; the Z.1 page says: "The next Z.1 release will be Thursday, December 10, 2026, at 12:00 noon." Primary source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/index.html^[1][4]

Comparison basis: the data files give levels in millions of dollars (the dictionary labels net worth "Millions of Dollars") and shares as percent of aggregate, rounded to one decimal; this page shows levels rounded to $0.01 trillion. The total is this page's sum of the five published group levels, The top 1% is the Fed's own grouping: its announcements say the top 0.1% and next 0.9% are summed to produce the top 1 percent in the data visualizations, while the two groups are kept separate in the detail files. The data files used here carry the two groups separately, so this page re-derived the top 1% share from the unrounded levels (32.5% in 2026:Q2), and it matches the sum of the published group shares (15.0 + 17.5). Percentage-point changes for single groups use the published rounded shares. These are model-based estimates, not survey observations, for recent quarters (see below). The overview, data files, announcements and Z.1 page are all from the Federal Reserve Board and count as one source.^[2][3]

In three lines

1. The DFAs are quarterly Federal Reserve estimates of how U.S. household wealth in the Financial Accounts is split across wealth, income, age, education, generation and race groups.
2. In the data for 2026:Q2 (overview updated September 18, 2026), the top 1% held an estimated 32.5% of household net worth and the bottom 50% 2.3%.
3. For quarters after 2022:Q3 the distribution is extrapolated by models until the next Survey of Consumer Finances is incorporated.^[1][2][3]

"The Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs) provide quarterly estimates of the distribution of a comprehensive measure of U.S. household wealth, beginning with the third quarter of 1989 and through the most recent quarter."^[1]

How they are built. "The DFAs use distributional information from the SCF to allocate the Financial Accounts aggregate measures of assets and liabilities to different wealth, income, and other socioeconomic sub-populations." "Because the two datasets use somewhat different wealth concepts and are measured at different frequencies, there are three key steps in constructing the DFAs." The overview describes the steps as reconciling the two datasets' concepts, interpolating the triennial survey balance sheets quarter by quarter and forecasting beyond the latest survey year, and then applying each group's shares to the Financial Accounts aggregates.^[1]

Groups and units. The wealth groups are the top 0.1%, the next 0.9% (together the top 1%), the next 9% (90th to 99th percentile), the next 40% (50th to 90th percentile) and the bottom 50%. Net worth is defined in the data definitions as total assets less total liabilities, and the detail files also report household counts per group.^[2]

Survey-based vs extrapolated quarters. The December 15, 2023 announcement explains: "The quarters between 2019q3 and 2022q3 are now interpolated between the 2019 and 2022 SCFs, while the quarters after 2022q3 are extrapolated using temporal disaggregation models built from Financial Accounts data and other sources." So the 2026 figures rest on the 2022 survey plus models, not on a newer survey (this page's reading of the announcement).^[1][3]

Level vs share. Bottom-50% net worth rose 3.0% from 2026:Q1 to 2026:Q2, while the group's share slipped from 2.4% to 2.3%, because the five-group total rose faster, by 7.2% (this page's calculations from the published levels).^[2]

Groups vs households. The top 0.1% group contains 136,779 households and the bottom 50% contains 67,616,544 (2026:Q2 detail file). Dividing net worth by household counts gives averages of about $203.7 million and $63,269 per household (this page's calculation); these are means, not medians, and the DFAs do not publish them.^[2]

DFA vs Financial Accounts categories. "As of the 2026Q2 release of the Financial Accounts, the household balance sheet shows holdings of hedge fund shares and private debt fund shares." "This change has not yet been implemented for the Distributional Financial Accounts." "Instead, these asset holdings are included in corporate equities and mutual funds."^[3]