Wealth Market Intelligence: Middle Tennessee

A book of business is built where the households are. In Middle Tennessee, the households with money are multiplying faster than in the state or the nation. This report measures that at neighborhood scale from Census household microdata: exact counts of affluent households for 18 markets covering the Nashville metro core and Clarksville, compared across survey years, then ranked twice. One ranking shows where wealth already sits; the other shows where it is forming.

134,660

Households at $200K+ income, 2024

14.4% of the market's 936K households

+37.9%

Growth in $200K+ households, 2022 → 2024

Tennessee +28.9% · U.S. +22.0%

$88,327

Median household income, 2024

U.S. $81,220 · Tennessee $72,083

49,467

Accumulators: 25–44 earning $150K+

up +37.8% since 2022

Five findings organize what follows. First: the market added 37,033 households at $200K+ income in two years. That is +37.9% growth, against +28.9% statewide and +22.0% nationally. Wealth is not merely present here; it is compounding faster than the baselines. Second: concentration and formation are different maps. The deepest standing wealth sits in the Williamson County corridor and west Nashville; the fastest growth is in urban Nashville, Murfreesboro and the county seats of the growth ring. An advisor choosing a territory should know which map they are reading. Third: the equity is extraordinary. 35.9% of the market’s owner-occupied homes are valued at $500K or more, and 51,313 owner households sit on a home worth $1M+. That home equity turns into planning conversations at every sale, inheritance and retirement.

Fourth: the pipeline is real. The metro has grown +8.7% since 2020, the eleven counties permitted 92,040 new homes in four years, and the microdata shows the arriving households skew young, educated and high-earning: the accumulator pool grew +37.8% in two years. Fifth: the two playbooks disagree, usefully. The Established-Book ranking and the Prospecting ranking share only 3 markets in their top fives, which is exactly why this report publishes both rather than one blended list.

Every figure in this report is computed from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample: the anonymized household records behind the published tables. Microdata means the questions are not limited to what the Census chose to tabulate. Any threshold, any age band, any combination can be counted exactly, with each record carrying its survey weight. The price is geography. The smallest area the Census publishes microdata for is the PUMA, a Public Use Microdata Area of roughly 100,000 residents. So this report’s “neighborhood markets” are PUMAs: large neighborhoods or clusters of towns, small enough that Davidson County contains six of them.

The market is 18 PUMAs covering 11 counties: the Nashville metro core (Davidson, Rutherford, Williamson, Sumner, Wilson, Maury, Robertson, Dickson, Cheatham, Hickman) plus Clarksville’s Montgomery County. Together they hold 936K households and 2.32M residents. Wealth is measured at fixed lines. $200K+ household income is “affluent” (the top 14.0% of American households), $100–200K is “emerging affluent,” and $500K and $1M mark the owner-home equity tiers. The “accumulator” is a 25-to-44-year-old earning $150K+: the client a practice grows old with. Counts are compared 2022 → 2024, the window in which every survey year sits on the same neighborhood boundaries.

Worked through Brentwood–Franklin, so the method is concrete. The Williamson County market, officially Williamson County--Brentwood & Franklin cities, Nolensville town (west) PUMA, holds 51,613 households. Of them, 19,418 report income of $200K or more: 37.6%, against 14.0% nationally. Its median household income is $147,211. Its median owner-occupied home is worth $790,000, 76.0% of its owner homes clear $500K, and 31.9% clear $1M. Its residents’ interest, dividend and rental income averages $11,609 per person per year, counting every person who earns none, and 27.7% of its 25-to-64-year-olds hold a graduate or professional degree. Even here the pool is still growing: +3,942 households at $200K+ in two years (+9.9% at the $100K line). Every one of those measurements, for every one of the 18 markets, is what the paid sections publish.

37.6%

Brentwood–Franklin: households at $200K+

19,418 households, the market's deepest

$147,211

Median household income

2024 survey year

76.0%

Owner homes worth $500K+

31.9% clear $1M

$11,609

Portfolio income per capita

interest, dividends and rent, incl. non-earners

Note. A PUMS estimate carries sampling error: each market’s figures rest on roughly a thousand sampled households per survey year, so treat any single-year, single-market count as a measurement with a confidence band, not a census. Two-year growth percentages on small bases are directional. Method quantifies this and lists every other limitation. One matters most: dollar thresholds are nominal in each survey year, so part of every growth figure is income inflation. The state and national baselines are computed the same way, which is what keeps the comparisons fair.

Every figure is computed by a deterministic pipeline from published federal files and the Census microdata, and the prose interpolates the same values the tables show; no number is typed by hand. The definitions, the window and every known limitation:

1. The microdata: ACS PUMS one-year, 2022–2024 (2020 PUMA boundaries throughout). PUMS records are anonymized household and person records with survey weights; every count here is the exact weighted sum of records meeting the stated condition. There is no modelling and no interpolation between published tables. Each market’s single-year figures rest on roughly a thousand sampled households, so estimates carry sampling error on the order of a few percent for large shares and proportionally more for small counts. Treat sub-thousand differences as direction, not magnitude.
2. The market: 18 PUMAs (2020 boundaries) tiling Davidson, Rutherford, Williamson, Sumner, Wilson, Maury, Montgomery, Robertson, Dickson, Cheatham and Hickman counties. PUMAs are the finest geography the Census publishes microdata for, and several deliberately span county lines (Springfield–Portland covers Robertson and part of Sumner; Dickson–Cheatham adds Hickman). Four small metro-area counties (Cannon, Macon, Smith and Trousdale) sit in PUMAs shared with non-metro counties and are excluded entirely rather than approximated. The short market names are this report’s labels for readability; every profile carries the official PUMA name.
3. The window: 2022 → 2024 survey years, chosen because the 2022, 2023 and 2024 one-year files all sit on 2020 PUMA boundaries. The 2021 file sits on 2010 boundaries (Tennessee had 49 PUMAs, not 58) and is excluded rather than crosswalked, because a boundary artifact would read as neighborhood change.
4. Dollars are nominal in each survey year. The Census adjusts amounts to each survey year’s dollars (ADJINC), so a fixed $200K line admits more households in 2024 than 2022 from income inflation alone. The market, Tennessee and national baselines are computed from the same microdata by the same rule, so cross-geography comparisons are the honest read (the market grew +37.9% against +22.0% nationally); the levels are not inflation-adjusted wealth measurements.
5. Household definitions: a household’s age band follows its householder (the first person on the survey form). “Owned free and clear” is the tenure code for ownership without a mortgage. Home values are owner-reported (the ACS VALP item), which is a balance-sheet self-assessment: it runs behind fast markets and ahead of slow ones, which is why section 12 shows Redfin closing prices beside it. Income bands classify gross household income of occupied households.
6. The wealth lines are editorial. $200K household income, $150K for accumulators and pre-retirees, $100K for business owners, $500K and $1M for homes. These are round numbers chosen for readability, not statistical breakpoints. Every underlying count is published, so a reader who prefers different lines can see exactly what would move.
7. Portfolio income and occupation mix: ACS PUMS 2024 one-year cross-section as published on this site's PUMA pages (portfolio-income means, occupation mix). Interest, dividend and net rental income (INTP) is averaged over ALL residents including non-earners. It is a density signal for asset-holding households, not an estimate of account sizes. Retirement income (RETP) covers pensions and retirement-account withdrawals, not Social Security. Occupation clusters sum the Census occupation groups named in each column.
8. Business owners are employed workers whose class of worker is self-employed (incorporated or not); the six-figure screen applies total personal income. Incorporated self-employment is reported separately because it correlates with employees and a transactable business.
9. County context: population and migration from Census PEP Vintage 2025 (2020–2025); homes permitted from Census Building Permits Survey, 2022–2025 (county series complete from 2022) (permits are authorizations, not completions); unemployment from BLS LAUS, 2025 annual; wages from BLS QCEW, 2019-Q4 → 2025-Q4 (nominal); GDP from BEA county GDP, 2019–2023 (chained 2017$ for real growth; county GDP publishes two years behind state); sale prices from Redfin county medians, June 2026 (vs June 2025 and June 2021); county-grain incomes, home values and degrees from ACS 2020–2024 five-year (county incomes, home values, degrees). Each column joins on its own family’s county key; a dash is a figure the source does not publish, never a zero.
10. The indices: nine pillars, each a z-score across the 18 market PUMAs, winsorized at ±2.5σ, equally weighted within each index, rescaled to 50 ± 10. Established Book = affluent density, home equity, portfolio income, pre-retiree wealth, business owners. Prospecting = affluent growth, accumulators, emerging affluent, young affluent. Opportunity = all nine. The scores are RELATIVE TO THIS MARKET; a 40 here is still a strong neighborhood by national standards. Equal weighting is an editorial choice; every pillar score is published on the profiles so a reader can re-weight.
11. What this report is not. It identifies geographies, never people: PUMS is anonymized by the Census Bureau under Title 13, and no figure here can be traced to a household. That also means this is not a prospect list and cannot substitute for one. It is not investment advice, not a suitability analysis, and not a projection: every number is a measurement of a past survey year. Advisors remain responsible for their own compliance obligations in how they prospect a territory this report helps them choose.

Note. Ranks run 1 = best in the stated direction. Assembled August 2026; each figure refers to its stated vintage, not the assembly date. The 2025 one-year PUMS, expected fall 2026, extends the growth window by a year and will be incorporated in the next edition.