The release
The Federal Reserve's Financial Accounts of the United States, known as the Z.1 report, showed household and nonprofit net worth rising $12.8 trillion in the second quarter of 2026 to a record $195.9 trillion. The ratio of net worth to disposable personal income reached 8.28, a record and above the prior peak recorded in the first quarter of 2022.
Owner-occupied real estate was valued at $49.8 trillion in the accounts, with real estate values contributing $1.1 trillion of the quarter's gain through revaluation. Corporate equities held directly and indirectly by households rose $10.7 trillion. Deposits and money market fund shares stood at $20.3 trillion, down $0.1 trillion on the quarter. Home mortgage liabilities were $14.0 trillion and consumer credit $5.1 trillion. Noncorporate business equity was $16.8 trillion, and defined-benefit pension entitlements stood at $16.7 trillion.
Revaluation, not saving
The Z.1 accounts separate a household sector's change in net worth into two components: transactions, meaning money actually saved or invested out of income, and revaluations, meaning the change in market value of assets already held. That distinction is the central fact of this release.
Estate Wire calculation: with equities up $10.7 trillion and real estate up $1.1 trillion accounting for the bulk of the $12.8 trillion quarterly increase, the overwhelming share of the gain reflects the market repricing of existing holdings rather than households setting aside more of their income. A household that owned no more stock or real estate at the end of the quarter than at the start could still show a large net-worth gain purely because the assets it already held became more valuable on paper.
That has a direct implication for how much weight to put on the record ratio to disposable income. A net-worth figure built mostly from revaluation can reverse as quickly as it appeared if asset prices fall, in a way that saved income generally does not.
A new addition to the accounts
The Fed integrated private credit funds and hedge funds into the Financial Accounts for the first time in this release, a methodological change previewed on August 28, 2026. That expands the scope of the accounts' financial-sector detail but does not itself change the household net-worth totals described above, which are built from the household and nonprofit sector tables.
Who actually holds the gain
The Fed's Distributional Financial Accounts, a companion product to the Z.1 that breaks aggregate wealth down by income and wealth percentile, have consistently shown corporate-equity ownership concentrated among higher-income and higher-wealth households. That pattern means an aggregate record in household net worth, driven substantially by equity revaluation, is not evidence of broadly shared gains across the income distribution.
Owner-occupied real estate is more widely held across the distribution than equities, which is part of why the $1.1 trillion real-estate revaluation component, though smaller than the equity gain, matters more for the typical household's balance sheet. But real estate wealth, too, is unevenly distributed by homeownership status and by region, and the Z.1 aggregate does not distinguish between a household with a large mortgage and one that owns outright.
For housing-market purposes, the report's separation of transactions from revaluations is the discipline worth carrying into any reading of the numbers: a record aggregate net worth built on equity and real-estate price gains describes what asset holders' balance sheets are worth on paper this quarter, not what households have newly saved, and not how that wealth is distributed among them.