U.S. Wealth Gap Reaches Unprecedented Levels

In its recent report, titled "UNEQUAL: The rise of a new American oligarchy and the agenda we need", NGO confederation Oxfam warns that the year 2025 in the United States has been "indelibly shaped by concentrated wealth and power". As our infographic shows, in 2022, a U.S. household needed a net wealth of $61,827,166 to reach the top .1 percentile. This was approximately 2,77 times more than in 1989, where the top .1 percentile started at $22,320,459. More importantly, between 1989 and 2022, the increase in wealth of a household at the top 1 percent cutoff was 101 times bigger than the increase in wealth for the median household, and 987 times bigger than the increase in wealth of the household at the 20th percentile. This means the poorest household in the top 1 percent gained 987 times more wealth than the richest household in the bottom 20 percent. According to Oxfam, trends in household wealth in recent decades perfectly illustrate the extreme split between the situation of the very wealthiest and everyone else.

Oxfam underlines that incomes have followed a similar trajectory in that time period: executive salaries have continued to rise while lower salaries have stagnated, and close to a quarter of the U.S. workforce are low-wage workers. As the report highlights, between 1980 and 2022, the share of national income going to the top 1 percent doubled, while the share going to the bottom 50 percent fell by a third. In other words, wealth has been concentrating more and more at the top. In 2025 alone, the 10 richest U.S. billionaires got $698 billion dollars richer, and since 2020, their inflation adjusted wealth is up 526 percent.