What Is the Average Inheritance? The Fed Does Not Publish One

Updated August 7, 2026. Quick answer: we could not find this figure, or any average inheritance figure, anywhere in the Federal Reserve data it is attributed to. The Fed does not publish one — and the one Fed paper that examines inheritances closely deliberately refuses to, because the distribution is so skewed that an average would mislead. About half of all inheritances are under $50,000, while transfers of $1m or more are 2% of the count and 40% of the money.

Where the number comes from

The figure is nearly always credited to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. So we looked for it there, three different ways, and it is not in any of them.

• The published bulletin. Changes in U.S. Family Finances, the Fed’s headline SCF report, contains zero occurrences of “inherit” or “bequest”.
• The summary dataset. The Summary Extract Public Data — roughly 410 derived variables, and the thing behind the Fed’s own interactive tools — contains no inheritance variable at all. Every variable beginning with “I” was enumerated to check.
• The full table set. Tables 1 to 18, covering 1989 to 2022, contain no inheritance, gift or bequest table. Not in any year.

The survey does ask. The 2022 questionnaire has a whole section on it — “Ever received an inheritance, substantial gift, or trust?”, with amount, year, source and asset type, for up to three events. So the raw data exists and the published statistics do not. Any “SCF average inheritance” is therefore somebody’s own tabulation of the microdata, not a Federal Reserve headline — and which tabulation, by whom, using which definition, is exactly what gets lost when the number is repeated.

What that source actually measured

Here is the part that turns this from a sourcing failure into a finding. The Fed does have an analysis of inheritances — a 2018 FEDS Note pooling the SCF from 1995 to 2016 — and it pointedly does not give an average. It gives shape instead:

“[A]bout half of all inheritances [are] in amounts less than $50,000”

“[T]ransfers of $1,000,000 or more account for only about 2 percent of the number of transfers at death, but 40 percent of total dollars transferred”

Both sentences run mid-paragraph in the original, so the opening capital is ours and is bracketed to show it. We hold other people to exact quotation, which only means anything if we do it here.

Feiveson and Sabelhaus, How Does Intergenerational Wealth Transmission Affect Wealth Concentration?, FEDS Notes, 1 June 2018. Read 7 August 2026.

Read those two sentences together and you can see why no average is offered. A tiny number of very large transfers carry nearly half the money. An arithmetic mean of that distribution describes almost nobody — it is pulled far above what a typical recipient gets, and far below what a large recipient gets. The Fed declining to publish the number is the most informative thing in this audit.

The honest current figure

The honest answer is a shape, not a number: about half of inheritances are under $50,000, and a very small share above $1m carries roughly 40% of all the money transferred at death. Inter vivos gifts behave the same way — more than 70% are under $50,000, while gifts over $1m account for almost half the dollars.

The same paper notes that people who receive transfers are not a cross-section of the country: their median net worth was $267,000 against $97,000 for the population, and median income $74,000 against $54,000. Inheritance is concentrated among people who already have more, which is another reason a single national average answers no useful question.

So if you are trying to plan around “the average inheritance”, the honest advice is that the average is the wrong tool. What matters is your own situation, and the distribution says most inheritances are modest.

What to cite instead

“The Federal Reserve does not publish an average inheritance figure. Its analysis of the Survey of Consumer Finances (1995-2016) reports instead that about half of all inheritances are under $50,000, while transfers of $1,000,000 or more make up about 2% of transfers at death but 40% of the total dollars transferred – a distribution too skewed for an average to be meaningful.”
Source: Clear Money Guide, The Provenance File, 2026. Free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0.

What this audit does not establish

This does not establish that $46,200 was invented. The SCF microdata does contain inheritance amounts, so somebody could compute a figure like it — a mean across recipients in a particular year, in particular dollars, would be a real calculation. What we could not find is any Federal Reserve publication stating it, which matters because the Fed is what the claim cites.

Two things we could not reach: the SCF codebook’s variable-definitions section, which would give the exact inheritance variable names, and the interactive tool’s category list, which is rendered by JavaScript. Either could in principle contain an inheritance statistic we did not see.

And we name no publisher. The search stayed inside federalreserve.gov and ran out of budget there, so we never fetched a page quoting $46,200. We know it circulates; we did not verify who currently publishes it, so we say nothing about that.

Related

Related and better-founded: what settling an estate actually costs, by state · how many Americans have a will · the 70%-lose-wealth claim.

This is an audit in the Provenance File. Our method, the six verdict classes and the desk laws are published at how we check money claims. If you think this is wrong, tell us — with a source. No advertising appears on this page and we earn nothing from it.