Wealth Market Intelligence: United States

America holds 18.5M households with $200K+ income, and they are not where the folk map says they are. This report measures the national wealth landscape from Census household microdata at two grains at once: every state counted, ranked and profiled, and every one of the country’s 2,462 neighborhood-scale markets screened for where affluence is deepest, where it is forming, and where the balance sheets behind it actually sit.

18.5M

U.S. households at $200K+ income, 2024

14.0% of 132.7M households

+22.0%

Growth in $200K+ households, 2022 to 2024

+3,343,076 households in two years

6.94M

Owner households in a $1M+ home

31.7% of owner homes clear $500K

6.48M

Accumulators: 25–44 earning $150K+

up +28.2% since 2022

Six findings organize what follows. First: the affluent pool grew +22.0% in two survey years, and the growth map inverts the density map. The deepest wealth sits where it always has, in the coastal metros; the fastest growth is in the Mountain West and the South. Second: the neighborhood grain changes the answer. State averages hide 2,462 neighborhoods whose affluent share runs from near zero to nearly sixty percent, and an advisor picks a neighborhood, not a state. Third: housing is the quiet majority of the balance sheet. 6.94M American owner households sit in a $1M+ home, and 40.3% of owners hold their home outright.

Fourth: the accumulator pool, the 25-to-44-year-olds already earning $150K+, grew +28.2% in two years to 6.48M people, and its density varies more across neighborhoods than any other measure here. Fifth: migration keeps rewriting the map. The fifty feeder counties in section 13 absorbed millions of domestic movers since 2020, and the neighborhoods forming around them are minting six-figure households at double-digit rates. Sixth: the two playbooks disagree at every grain. The states and neighborhoods that rank highest for standing wealth are rarely the ones adding wealth fastest, which is exactly why both rankings are published with every pillar score.

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, each carrying its survey weight. Microdata means any threshold, any age band, any combination can be counted exactly. 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 “neighborhoods” are PUMAs: large neighborhoods, city districts or clusters of towns. There are 2,462 of them, and this report measures every one.

Wealth is measured at fixed lines. $200K+ household income is “affluent” (the top 14.0% of American households), $100–200K is “emerging affluent,” $500K and $1M mark the owner-home equity tiers, and the “accumulator” is a 25-to-44-year-old earning $150K+. Counts are compared between the 2022 and 2024 survey years, the window in which every one-year file sits on the same neighborhood boundaries in every state.

Worked through the deepest state first. District of Columbia holds 329,688 households, and 86,963 of them report $200K+ income: 26.4%, the highest share in the country against 14.0% nationally. Its median household income is $108,632, its median owner-occupied home is worth $750,000, and 39.2% of its 25-to-64-year-olds hold a graduate or professional degree. Now the deepest neighborhood: Western Central, CT, officially Western Central PUMA. Of its 36,243 households, 21,519 report $200K+ income: 59.4%, roughly one household in two. Its median owner home is worth $990,000 and its residents’ interest, dividend and rental income averages $20,612 per person per year, counting every person who earns none. Every measurement in those two paragraphs, for every state and every listed neighborhood, is what the paid sections publish.

26.4%

District of Columbia: households at $200K+

the deepest state

59.4%

The deepest neighborhood

Western Central, CT

$990,000

Its median owner home

owner-reported, 2024

$20,612

Its portfolio income per capita

interest, dividends and rent, incl. non-earners

Note. A PUMS estimate carries sampling error: a neighborhood’s single-year figures rest on roughly a thousand sampled households, a state’s on tens of thousands. Neighborhood rankings therefore carry disclosed sample floors, growth figures on small bases are directional, and dollar thresholds are nominal in each survey year, so part of every growth figure is income inflation. The national baseline is computed from the same records by the same rule, which is what keeps the comparisons fair. Method states all of it.

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, the floors and every known limitation:

1. The microdata: ACS PUMS one-year, 2022–2024 (2020 PUMA boundaries in every state, asserted). 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. A state’s single-year figures rest on tens of thousands of sampled households; a neighborhood’s on roughly a thousand, so neighborhood estimates carry proportionally more sampling error and the rankings carry floors (below).
2. The geography: all 2,462 PUMAs (2020 boundaries) and all 51 states, the District of Columbia counted as a state throughout. DC is a city-scale jurisdiction compared against full states; its density-driven ranks reflect that and should be read accordingly. Neighborhood short names strip the literal “PUMA” suffix for readability; every listed neighborhood’s official Census name appears in the tables.
3. The window: the 2022 and 2024 survey years for growth (2023 shown in state trajectories), chosen because all three one-year files sit on 2020 PUMA boundaries in every state. The pipeline asserts this rather than assuming it. Earlier files sit on 2010 boundaries and are excluded rather than crosswalked.
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. Every geography is measured by the same rule against the same lines, so cross-geography comparisons are the honest read; the levels are not inflation-adjusted wealth measurements.
5. The floors: neighborhood rankings require 15,000 households (density/equity), 8,000 $100K+ households in 2022 (growth), 10,000 adults 25–44 (accumulators) or 20,000 adults 25+ (business owners). A share ranked on a tiny denominator is sampling noise wearing a rank; the floors trade a little coverage for a lot of honesty, and the full unfloored universe still feeds every index.
6. 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), a balance-sheet self-assessment that runs behind fast markets and ahead of slow ones; section 14 shows transacted prices beside it. Income bands classify gross household income of occupied households.
7. The wealth lines are editorial. $200K household income, $150K for accumulators and pre-retirees, $100K for business owners, $500K and $1M for homes. These are round numbers chosen for readability, not statistical breakpoints. Every underlying count is published, so a reader who prefers different lines can see exactly what would move.
8. Portfolio income, retirement income and neighborhood medians: ACS PUMS 2024 one-year cross-section as published on this site's PUMA pages (medians, portfolio-income means, degrees). Interest, dividend and net rental income (INTP) is averaged over ALL residents including non-earners. It is a density signal for asset-holding households, not an estimate of account sizes. Retirement income (RETP) covers pensions and retirement-account withdrawals, not Social Security. State medians are computed exactly from the weighted microdata; neighborhood medians come from the published 2024 cross-section.
9. Business owners are employed workers whose class of worker is self-employed (incorporated or not); the six-figure screen applies total personal income. Incorporated self-employment is reported separately because it correlates with employees and a transactable business.
10. County context: population and migration from Census PEP Vintage 2025 (2020–2025); homes permitted from Census Building Permits Survey, 2022–2025 (county series complete from 2022) (permits are authorizations, not completions); sale prices from Redfin county medians, June 2026 (vs June 2021). Feeder counties require 50,000 residents; housing-heat counties require 250,000. State wages from BLS QCEW, 2019-Q4 → 2025-Q4 (nominal); state GDP from BEA state GDP, 2019–2025 (chained 2017$ for real growth); unemployment from BLS LAUS, 2025 annual. A dash is a figure the source does not publish, never a zero.
11. The indices: nine pillars, each a z-score 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. State scores are z-scored across the 51 states; neighborhood scores across all 2,462 PUMAs, so the two scales are not interchangeable. Equal weighting is an editorial choice; every pillar score is published so a reader can re-weight.
12. 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. A regional deep-dive companion, Wealth Market Intelligence: Middle Tennessee, applies this method at full neighborhood depth to one metro.