Rich Americans are getting richer, but not all equally. The K-shaped split that let high earners pull away from low earners now cuts through the top 1% too, with the ultra-rich far ahead of the rest.
The average household in the top 0.1% is now worth about $204 million, or 7.7 times as much as one in the rest of the top 1%, according to a Fortune analysis of Federal Reserve data. That ratio is the highest in the Fed’s quarterly series going back to 1989, up from 6.2 times at the end of 2019. Currently, the Fed counts 136,779 households in the top 0.1%
The top 0.1%’s wealth has more than doubled since the end of 2019, from $13.4 trillion to nearly $28 trillion in the second quarter of 2026. Over the same period, the rest of the top 1% saw its wealth grow 68%, from $19.3 trillion to $32.5 trillion. The top 0.1% now holds 15% of the nation’s household wealth, up 0.5 percentage point since the first quarter.
“We are talking about continued redistribution upward and further concentration of wealth at the top,” Markus Schneider, an associate professor of economics at the University of Denver, told Fortune.
Why the ultra-rich pulled ahead
The clearest difference between the two groups is what they own.
More than half of the top 0.1%’s assets are in stocks and mutual funds, which left the group well-positioned to ride the stock market’s repeated record highs in recent years, largely driven by AI and tech. The top 0.1% holds almost as much in stocks and mutual funds as the rest of the top 1% combined—$16.2 trillion versus $16.7 trillion—even though the rest of the 1% has nine times as many households, Fed data shows.
The rest of the 1% also has more of its wealth tied up in real estate and defined-contribution retirement accounts. It holds $4.7 trillion in real estate, compared with nearly $2 trillion for the top 0.1%, and about $1.7 trillion in in those retirement plans, compared with just $230 billion for the top 0.1%, Fed data shows.
The different mix helps explain why their fortunes are split, according to Eric Zwick, a professor of economics and finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He said when stocks rise faster than home prices, the households with more of their wealth invested reap more gains.
“It’s been an extraordinarily good period for public markets, and a lot of that is driven by some of these really high-performing tech companies,” Zwick told Fortune.
Zwick also said high interest rates have slowed the housing market, and that home prices have fallen in some parts of the country “relative to what’s going on in the stock market.”
The gap has widened before. It expanded substantially from 2003 through 2007 ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, per the Fed data, rising from about 5 times in early 2003 to 6.3 times in late 2007. The previous high was 6.5 times, in early 1998.
What the data can’t say
Zwick noted the Fed data can’t reveal whether the top 0.1% owns more AI stocks than the rest of the 1% because it assumes every group holds the same mix of stocks. The data also counts whoever is in the top 0.1% in a given quarter rather than tracking the same households over time, which could hide how many people move in and out of the group as some companies grow and others shrink.
“There were companies that were doing really well 10 years ago that are struggling now, and there are companies that came out of nowhere that are now some of the biggest companies in the economy, and that means that people who own those companies or top workers of those companies are suddenly moving above other people,” he said.
He also cautioned against assuming the K-shaped divide in the 1% is permanent.
“It sort of feels like it’s an artifact of the very specific economic shocks that are happening right now, as opposed to some super deep structural change in the economy,” he said.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: fortune.com
