The typical U.S. household held $8,000 in bank accounts in 2022 — but that middle number hides big gaps. Balances climb with age, roughly double for couples versus singles, and jump more than twentyfold between households with no diploma and households with a college degree. Pick a breakdown below and see where each group lands.
Bank accounts only — checking, savings, money market accounts, brokerage cash and prepaid cards. Nothing else is counted.
Median — all households
$8,000
Half of households hold less than this, half hold more.
Average (mean) — all households
$62,410
Nearly 8× the median — a small share of very large balances pulls the average up.
Households with an account
98.6%
Nearly every household had money in a transaction account in 2022.
Bars are scaled to the largest value in the current view, so lengths are comparable within a view — switch views and the scale resets. Dollar figures are exact survey values, not rounded estimates.
All households lumped together
≈ $8.1 trillion
Households in the survey
131.3 million
With an account (98.6%)
≈ 129.5 million
× Average balance
$62,410
Enter your own bank balance and pick the group you belong to. A red marker appears on the charts above, and you’ll see how your balance stacks up against that group’s median — and roughly which percentile of all U.S. households it lands in.
Enter a balance to see your comparison. Nothing you type leaves this page or is stored anywhere.
Median balances across the last four Federal Reserve surveys. Every age group ended 2022 higher than it started in 2013 — and households under 35 were the only group whose median rose at every single survey.
The numbers — by age
| Age group | Median | Average (mean) | Average ÷ median |
|---|
These figures cover transaction accounts: checking and savings accounts, money market accounts, brokerage cash accounts, and prepaid debit cards — the money a household can spend or withdraw right away.
They do not include retirement accounts (401(k)s, IRAs), certificates of deposit, stocks, or home equity. That’s why the numbers look small next to net-worth figures: this is cash on hand, not total wealth.
The average is nearly eight times the median because a relatively small number of households keep very large cash balances, and they drag the average upward.