Older Americans may be stepping away from the grind, but their balance sheets keep climbing.
Baby boomers now hold a record share of the nation’s wealth, according to Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, who cited Federal Reserve data in a Sunday blog post. Back in 1989, Americans over age 70 controlled 19% of household-sector wealth. Today, that figure has jumped to 31%.
That’s an outsized slice compared with other generations. Baby boomers make up roughly 20% of the U.S. population, yet hold more than $85 trillion in assets, based on Fed data. Millennials represent a similar share of the population but hold about $18 trillion—around one-fifth as much.
The contrast is even sharper when stacked against Gen Z. Many younger adults are uneasy about the economic future, feel squeezed out of entry-level opportunities as AI reshapes hiring, and are leaning on credit cards while still dealing with student loan payments. As of last year, Gen Z held about $6 trillion in wealth—despite being a similarly sized cohort to boomers and millennials.
“The baby [boomer] generation has really gobbled up a huge share of household wealth, so it’s left a lot less for other age cohorts,” Edward Wolff, professor of economics at New York University, told Fortune.
Baby boomers’ good timing
Today’s septuagenarians were often raised by parents shaped by the Great Depression—households where saving, caution, and stretching a dollar were treated as survival skills. But beyond personal habits, boomers also benefited from unusually favorable economic timing during key wealth-building years.
When many boomers entered the housing market in the 1970s, inflation was surging, and buying property looked like a strong hedge. Over the decades that followed, rising home prices boosted their household equity dramatically. Stock ownership also played a major role. An early 2025 analysis of Fed data by the Motley Fool found baby boomers held 54% of stocks worth more than $25 trillion. Millennials held about 8% of stocks, worth $3.9 trillion.
Gen Z, even as more of them begin investing, hasn’t been handed the same housing-market runway. Housing supply has remained constrained since the 2008 recession, and high mortgage rates have discouraged homeowners from selling—helping push prices even higher.
That has had visible downstream effects. In 2025, the share of first-time homebuyers fell 21%, and the typical first-time buyer reached a record age of 40, according to November data from the National Association of Realtors. A March Redfin report found that today only 33% of 27-year-olds own homes, compared with 40% of baby boomers who owned homes at the same age.
“They weren’t able to enjoy the big appreciation of house prices to the same extent as baby boomers,” Wolff said.
Gen Z’s silver lining
Gen Z is dealing with real headwinds, but it isn’t all bad news. Pew Research Center data from 2024 suggests Zoomers may be in better financial shape than many young adults in earlier eras. In 2023, Gen Z workers earned a median pay of about $20,000 (inflation-adjusted). In 1993, 18- to 24-year-olds earned roughly $15,000. If income growth continues to outpace home-price growth, that could eventually ease pressure on future buyers.
There’s also a simpler explanation for why Gen Z holds less wealth: they’ve had less time to build it. Michael Walden, professor emeritus of economics at North Carolina State University, told Fortune that wealth accumulation naturally rises with age.
“It makes logical sense that older people will accumulate greater percentages of wealth at any point in time because they’ve had more years to invest and reap the returns of their investments,” Walden said.
And beyond what they build themselves, younger generations may eventually benefit from the massive intergenerational inheritance cycle often described as the Great Wealth Transfer—projected by some estimates to move $124 trillion to younger generations over time. In the ultra-wealthy tier, inheritances are already accelerating: 91 heirs inherited a record $297.8 billion this year, according to the UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report, a 36% increase from last year.
Still, Walden argued young people shouldn’t anchor their plans on an inheritance arriving at the “right” time.
“It’s hard to target when that’s going to come, so I would argue to any young person that I would be talking to, have a plan, be consistent with the plan,” he said.
