The top 1% of the income distribution saves over 60 times as much as the bottom 20%: Net savings rates by income group (2007–2018 pooled data average)
| Savings rates by income group | |
|---|---|
| Bottom fifth | 0.5% |
| Second from bottom | 3.1% |
| Middle fifth | 4.4% |
| Second from top | 6.0% |
| Top fifth | 12.8% |
| Top 1 percent | 30.6% |
Notes: Savings rates are a measure of net new assets acquired by households, which are grouped according to distribution of income after government taxes and benefits.
Extended notes: To calculate net savings rate by income group, we combine aggregate personal savings data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Financial Accounts of the United States (FRB 2021) and income share data from the FRB’s Distributional Financial Accounts, which provide asset and liability components broken down by income grouping. We map the various asset and liability categories and subcategories in each dataset onto one another to calculate net savings (assets minus liabilities) per income grouping. Finally, we scale the net savings by each group’s income after taxes and transfers—a measure of total personal disposable income taken from the Congressional Budget Office’s 2018 data series on household income distribution (CBO 2021)—to get each income group’s saving rate in 2018.
Source: Data on personal savings and income shares from the Federal Reserve Board (FRB 2021a, 2021b) and household income data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO 2021).