- Millennials, the generation with the largest wealth divide, saw financial gains—but only the ones lucky enough to own a home.
Millennials—the generation plagued by the Great Recession and old photos of them wearing business casual to the club—might just find that their luck is turning around. The cohort is reaching financial milestones at a faster pace than researchers from the St. Louis Federal Reserve expected, having looked at the generation history and how other generations fared when around the same age.
The median wealth of older millennials is 37% above expectations and 39% above expectations for younger millennials and Gen Zers, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s analysis of data from 2022.
“While there is wide variation within this group, the typical millennial born in the 1980s thus did better than we had expected,” the authors write .Noting that young families “made remarkable gains,” they add that older millennials have a history of often being behind expectations as highlighted by their previous analysis of data from 1989 to 2016.
Researchers looked at the combined value of nonfinancial assets, such as homes and cars, and financial assets, such as savings and retirement accounts. The generation collectively is now worth about, $15.95 trillion, per Federal Reserve data.
The average older millennial is now approaching their middle adulthood, aged 38. Factoring how other generations fared at the same life phase, the report’s authors initially projected they would be worth a median $95,000. In reality, the typical member of this generation has over $130,000. For younger members of the generation median wealth more than quadrupled in three years, reaching $41,000.
Even so, much of the cohort describes feeling still left behind. It’s in part due to the major class-divide in the generation and the phenomenon known as “phantom wealth.”
Millennials tackle the housing market. Many find it unattainable
Owning a home has proven key to millennials’ unique comeback story as the authors note that “housing assets drove most of the overall growth.” Homeownership rates increased by 7% from 2019 to 2022 for older millennials and by 11% for younger millennials (who still own far less than their more senior counterparts). In this time “home prices also appreciated considerably,” add the report authors, noting that the value of said investment therefore drove up wealth.
In the case of said lucky homeowners, many are not able to feel the worth of said asset in a day-to-day capacity. It’s a disconnect from their perceived and actual financial situation known as “phantom wealth.” Indeed, a swath of young adults has recently reported feeling stuck or locked into their “starter homes.”
Even so, there seems to be a tale of two cities when it comes to the generation. More than half of adults (55%) aged 18 to 34 say it’s “much harder,” for them to buy a home than it was for their parents— according to a 2023 poll from Youth & Money in the USA poll by CNBC and Generation Lab. Indeed, housing recently has felt to be an inaccessible dream for many young adults, as this past summer affordability reached decade lows.
“Homeownership is just unaffordable,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told Fortune in 2024. He adds that millennials “already feel disenfranchised,” and “if they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home, it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives.”
In part, this drastic divide in experiences can be attributed to the stark inequality within the generation. The wealth gap between millennials is the largest of any generation, according to a recent study as published by the University of Chicago.
“Millennials are so different from one another that it is not particularly meaningful to talk about the ‘average’ Millennial experience,” wrote the study’s authors.
