In financial terms, millennials are having a good decade.
The generation born between 1981 and 1996 has built wealth faster than either Generation X or baby boomers in the 2020s, according to several recent reports. Another batch of studies show that millennials have more wealth now than older generations held at the same age.
"They're doing better than we did," said Christian Weller, a Gen Xer and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank.
A 2024 report from CAP found that the average wealth of under-40 Americans rose by 49% between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, to an inflation-adjusted average net worth of $259,000. That group includes millennials and the oldest of Generation Z. Millennials, by themselves, saw their wealth double in those years.
By contrast, wealth declined by 7% between 2019 and 2023 for Americans ages 40 to 54, a group dominated by Generation X. Wealth rose by 4% for Americans ages 55 to 69, mostly boomers.
A 2025 report from Empower, the financial services company, found that millennial wealth rose 13% in 2024. Gen X and boomers saw much smaller gains.
Millennials are wealthier now than older Americans were at the same age. The median millennial had a net worth of $84,941 in 2022, according to an analysis from the personal finance site LendingTree. Adjusting for inflation, Generation X had a median net worth of $78,333 at the same age. Boomers had a median net worth of $58,101.
Millennials and Gen-Z adults have amassed wealth across the board in the 2020s. Average housing wealth for under-40 households rose by $22,000 between the end of 2019 and the end of 2023, the CAP analysis found. Liquid assets, including bank deposits, grew by $9,000. Other financial assets, including stocks and mutual funds, rose by $31,000.
"It's every single category that has gone up," Weller said. "That is home equity, retirement savings, equity in privately held businesses - all of that has grown faster" than for older generations, he said. "Homeownership has risen faster; wages have grown faster."
Millennial wealth is a Cinderella story. Millennial finances languished for years. As recently as five years ago, millennials trailed far behind older generations in net worth. As of mid-2019, millennial wealth totaled roughly $4 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data. Gen X wealth totaled $25 trillion, and baby boomers held $59 trillion.
By the third quarter of 2024, however, millennial wealth had quadrupled to $16 trillion. Gen X and boomer wealth grew much more slowly.
One big reason why millennials are gaining wealth at a faster rate than older Americans in the 2020s is that they had much less money at the decade's start.
Their rising fortunes also have a lot to do with the economic cycles that have played out in their adult lifetimes, financial analysts say.
Many millennials started their careers, or tried to, during the bleak years of the Great Recession in the late 2000s. Home values plummeted, joblessness spiked, and the S&P 500 lost more than half of its value.
Millennials had it bad in the Great Recession, but some older generations had it worse.
The downturn descended when the oldest Gen-Xers and the youngest baby boomers were in their prime earning years, their 30s and 40s.
Coming out of the Great Recession, the "Beatlemania" boomers, born in the early 1960s, had less wealth than older generations. To this day, that cohort lags in retirement wealth, research shows.
The same economic malaise afflicts much of Generation X. Americans ages 45 to 54 have less wealth than older generations held at the same age, according to the 2022 federal Survey of Consumer Finances.
Because millennials were younger in the Great Recession years, the damage to their lifetime earnings was comparatively small.
"Millennials have had more time to recover from the hits they took in the Great Recession, when they were just coming out of the gates," said Matt Schulz, chief consumer finance analyst at LendingTree. "I think a lot of them learned a lot of lessons from that period that have stuck with them."
The millennial wealth boom is not, however, a story of unqualified financial success.
Millennials are increasingly turning to debt consolidation, according to data from Money Management International, or MMI, the debt-counseling nonprofit.
Millennials represent 43% of new counseling clients at MMI, leading all other generations, the agency reports. The average millennial client now carries $30,000 in unsecured debt, including credit card debt.
Federal Reserve data suggests that millennials, and thirtysomethings in particular, are carrying more debt now than a few years ago, especially by comparison with other age groups.
In the closing months of 2019, consumers in their 40s had the most total debt, $3.6 trillion, followed by Gen-X fifty-somethings ($3.3 trillion) and millennial thirty-somethings ($3 trillion), federal data show.
By the close of 2024, the generations had switched places. Forty-somethings still had the most total debt, $4.7 trillion. But now, thirty-somethings ranked second, with $4 trillion in debt. Fifty-somethings had fallen to third.
To some extent, millennial wealth is a story of haves and have-nots. Just over half of millennials are homeowners, according to a 2024 analysis by The Motley Fool. The generation took longer to reach that threshold than older generations, because of rising home prices. Many millennials missed out on a chance to amass property wealth.
"I think that older millennials, who bought into the housing market before everything got out of control, are probably driving a fair amount of this overall net worth growth," said Schulz of LendingTree.
Nearly 70% of millennial wealth is concentrated in the top 10% of the generational population, according to an analysis by Inequality.org, a nonprofit that tracks wealth disparities. Their 2024 report terms millennials the "most unequal generation" in the United States.
"It's definitely not every millennial who's basking in wealth," Schulz said.