Are you ahead of your age?

Net worth is the value of all assets (bank accounts, investments, real estate, business equity, retirement accounts, durables) minus all debts (mortgages, credit cards, student loans, business loans). The figure is per adult, on an equal-split household basis.

Your cohort percentile places you against people in the same age band in the same country. Your country percentile places you against the country's full adult population.

Eurozone countries are sourced from the Eurosystem Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS), which publishes age-decile wealth distributions every three years. The United States uses the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). The United Kingdom uses the ONS Wealth and Assets Survey, Australia uses HILDA, Canada uses the Survey of Financial Security, and Japan uses the Family Income and Expenditure Survey.

For countries without direct age-cohort data, we transfer the cohort shape from a same-income-group regional peer and anchor the level to that country's full-population wealth distribution from the World Inequality Database. These are flagged as estimated.

Wealth grows fastest in the years before retirement, peaks in late middle age, and either stabilises or declines thereafter as households draw down savings. The shape is not the same in every country. In the United States the peak is around age 60. In Italy and Spain, where housing is concentrated in older cohorts, the peak shifts later. In Sweden and Denmark the curve is flatter because pensions are publicly provided.

Each country's curve is fitted to its own published age-decile distribution. The body of each cohort is modelled as a log-normal curve with a Pareto top tail above the 95th percentile, calibrated to published 99th and 99.9th percentile thresholds.

Age cohorts are five or ten years wide. A 39-year-old and a 30-year-old are placed in the same band even though their typical wealth differs. The smooth curve interpolates between bands; the band-level percentile is the precise figure.

Bottom-decile wealth at young ages is often zero or slightly negative due to student debt and starting positions. Where the published distribution has negative values, they are clamped to a small positive number for display purposes.

The figures are individual, not household. Two earners pooling resources are not interchangeable with one. Cost of living is not adjusted.

What's a good net worth at 30? The published median for adults aged 30-39 in your country is shown in the cohort median stat card. Anything materially above that puts you ahead of your age group.

Is retirement money included? Yes. Retirement accounts (pensions, 401(k)s, IRAs and equivalents) are part of net worth.

Why does the curve dip after 65? Households often spend down savings during retirement. The curve reflects that.

Are debts subtracted? Yes. Net worth is assets minus debts.

Data is refreshed annually, in line with the underlying source releases.