Although barely visible on Figure 1, which ends at $5 million, a substantial fraction of households (over 10%) have wealth exceeding $2 million, with some reaching as high as $2.3 billion. Our $5 million cutoff excludes nearly the top 5% of U.S. households. At the other end of the distribution, more than 15% of U.S. households have hardly any wealth, and another almost 10% have even negative wealth.

Table 2 summarizes distributional properties on wealth using standard inequality measures. The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of economic inequality, typically measuring income or wealth distribution within a population. It ranges from 0 to 1, where 0 represents perfect equality (everyone has the same wealth) and 1 represents perfect inequality (one person holds all the wealth). The Gini coefficient for wealth in the United States for 2022 is equal to 0.83. In comparison, the Gini coefficient for income equals 0.61, which indicates that wealth is more unequally distributed than income.
The lower five rows of Table 2 provide statistics describing distributional asymmetry. In symmetric distributions, the mean would appear at the 50th percentile (the median). Instead, we find the mean at the 83rd percentiles for wealth, indicating pronounced right-skewness. The mean-to-median ratios quantify this asymmetry: 5.5 for wealth. The final three rows detail the asymmetry distribution in more detail through percentile ratios relative to the median. The 99-50 ratio captures the distance between the very top and the middle: those at the 99th percentile have a striking 71 times the wealth of median households. The 50-30 ratio reveals that median households possess 3-4 times the wealth of those at the 30th percentile.