A retired reader recently wrote to me with a question that sounds simple but isn’t: how much money does someone need to be considered rich in the United States?
He wasn’t writing from a place of luxury. He was writing from frustration. If you have $4 million saved for retirement and follow the classic rule of withdrawing 4% a year, he said, you’re “hardly rich.” After taxes, insurance, health care, and food, that lifestyle can feel more middle-class than wealthy. Even with a house paid off and no debt, he has watched maintenance costs, property taxes, and insurance roughly double in the last four years. Add in Social Security increases that lag behind real-world inflation, and he feels like the promise of security has quietly broken. His bottom line: So what counts as rich anymore?
That question is being asked from many directions. People struggling to pay rent feel locked out of stability entirely, while people who look affluent on paper feel squeezed by rising costs and shrinking purchasing power. These are two different experiences, but they overlap in one big way: inequality doesn’t just shape what we have — it shapes what we think we should have to feel okay.
“Rich” is partly math — and partly comparison
There is a numerical answer to this question, but it’s only one answer among many. Wealth is tied to geography, lifestyle, health, family needs, and expectations. If your closest circle includes Silicon Valley millionaires or a neighbor who made a windfall trading Nvidia or Palantir, your own perfectly solid financial life can start to feel small. The yardstick changes depending on who you’re standing next to.
Even so, surveys show Americans do share some broad benchmarks. In Charles Schwab’s 2025 Modern Wealth Survey, respondents said they’d need about $839,000 to feel “financially comfortable.” That figure has climbed from $778,000 last year, though it’s still below the $1 million mark that felt necessary in 2023, when inflation anxieties were at their hottest. Over the past five years, Americans have generally hovered around the belief that roughly $2 million is the entry point to being “wealthy,” give or take a bit.
What’s driving those numbers upward? The same things our retiree is noticing: inflation, taxes, and broader economic uncertainty. Many also point to higher interest rates, which make borrowing more expensive and can dull the sense of future financial growth — even when markets are doing well.
Wealth looks different once you zoom out
Perspective matters. A middle-class American lifestyle — the kind that includes a stable home, health care, some savings, and a few comforts — would be considered extraordinary in many parts of the developing world. In several countries, monthly minimum wages sit far below what Americans might spend on groceries alone. By global standards, large portions of the U.S. middle class are “rich.” But that’s not how humans experience life day to day.
We don’t compare ourselves to the world. We compare ourselves to our neighborhood, our relatives, our coworkers, and whoever fills our social feeds.
The “wealth classes” and the gap in the middle
One MarketWatch report offered a helpful framework, laying out five wealth classes by net worth. A middle-class household has a net worth roughly between $29,300 and $209,000. Upper-middle-class households fall between $209,000 and $714,000. The upper class climbs to about $2.1 million. And then there’s the richest 10%, who live in a different financial universe altogether.
That gulf between middle and upper-middle is one reason so many people feel stuck. If the people right around you are pulling away quickly, your own progress can feel like failure, even when it isn’t.
Meanwhile, around 25 million U.S. households earn less than $30,000 a year. Call them working-class, blue-collar, however you prefer — they represent a large share of the country, and their economic reality is nothing like the one our retiree is describing. Over the last five decades, the share of adults living in middle-class households has fallen to about half the population, down from over 60% in the early 1970s.
Inflation changes everything — especially housing
Inflation isn’t an abstract chart; it’s the thing that decides whether your money feels like enough. Housing is the biggest example. Even if you’ve paid off your mortgage, rising property taxes and insurance can make homeownership feel less like security and more like a bill that never stops growing.
Nationally, Zillow puts the average home value around $363,932 — but state and city gaps are huge. California averages over $760,000. New York City pushes above $800,000. A life that feels comfortable in one place can feel fragile in another.
Food inflation since 2020 has also been brutal, rising roughly 25%. Grocery prices have become a daily reminder to many Americans that their paychecks don’t stretch like they used to, and that sense of pressure helped shape the political mood of the last election.
Politics feeds the same feeling, from different angles
Economic disenfranchisement isn’t only personal — it’s political fuel. Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 was driven in part by voters who felt the cost of living had run away from them after the pandemic years. To many, he represented a promise — or at least a protest — against that drift.
At the same time, figures on the left are channeling the same anger toward different targets. Zohran Mamdani, running for mayor of New York City, has argued that the existence of billionaires is incompatible with deep inequality. Different rhetoric, different villains, same emotional core: someone else is doing much better than we are, and it isn’t fair.
The Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act reflects that tension. The biggest gains, it says, go to the top 10% and to middle-class households, while the bottom 10% could see losses from program cuts and tighter eligibility for things like SNAP and Medicaid. Whether you see that as growth or betrayal depends a lot on where you sit.
Age helps — but comparison never retires
Net worth generally rises with age. Fidelity estimates average net worth around $183,500 for people under 35, climbing to about $1.79 million for those 65 to 74. Careers mature, savings compound, and retirement accounts build over decades.
Still, old comparisons don’t die easily. A sibling buying a villa in the south of France might spark pride and jealousy at the same time. A neighbor upgrading to something flashy can trigger resentment, even among people doing fine.
And that’s the heart of it: wealth isn’t only about numbers. It’s about perception, stability, health, time, community, and expectations. In Schwab’s research, people linked well-being most strongly to relationships, happiness, free time, and physical and mental health — with money ranked last.
So perhaps the cleanest answer to the retiree’s question is this: being rich and feeling rich aren’t the same thing. Inflation and inequality can make even a strong balance sheet feel shaky. But wantonness — always needing more — is its own separate beast.
