Updated August 14, 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.
The claim: “The average inheritance is $46,200”
Verdict: UNSUPPORTED — We searched and could not find a primary basis.
Evidence tier: official. Verdict class chosen from the taxonomy fixed before the evidence.
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 — 357 derived variables in the 2022 wave, counted column by column from the Board’s own
SCFP2022.csv(SHA-2569721aa73…, re-downloaded 13 August 2026), 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 — and our own tabulation of the 2022 microdata, below, says the same thing in 2022 numbers.
What the microdata says, computed here
Added August 14, 2026. Two of the gaps named below have since been closed, by going to the microdata itself rather than to what is published from it. Neither changes the verdict above — they sharpen the reason for it.
First, the variable names. The SCF codebook’s variable-definitions section, the thing this audit could not reach, was read on 12 August 2026. The inheritance block is headed “INHERITANCES AND CHARITABLE CONTRIBUTIONS” and opens at X5801: “Including any gifts or inheritances you may have already told me about, have you (or your {husband/wife/partner/spouse}) ever received an inheritance, or been given substantial assets in a trust or in some other form?” The braces are the survey’s own, marking where the interviewer substitutes the right word, and we leave them in rather than tidy them out. The question then instructs: “IF YES: Please do not include inheritances from a deceased spouse.” — so a widow’s inheritance from her husband is not in any figure below. The amounts are X5804, X5809 and X5814 — “What was its approximate value at the time it was received?” — with X5818 collecting everything from a fourth receipt onward, X5802 counting them, X5805 the year and X5806 the source. None of these variables appears in the Summary Extract, which is what the audit above found by enumeration and now knows by name.
Second, the tabulation this page said somebody could do. We did it, on the 2022 wave of the full public data set:
- 21.8% of families have ever received an inheritance, trust or substantial gift — which means 78.2% never have, so across all families the median inheritance is $0.
- Among those who have: median $80,800, mean $271,985. The mean is 3.4 times the median.
- The concentration is the reason: the top 10% of recipients hold 63.0% of all the inherited dollars and the top 1% hold 22.6%. Receipts of $1m or more are 5.7% of recipients; 46.5% received $100,000 or more; the 90th percentile is $586,000 and the 99th is $3,507,800.
That does not rescue the average — it is the arithmetic of why an average misleads. A mean 3.4 times its own median describes almost nobody: it sits far above what a typical recipient gets and far below what a large one gets. Our own number confirms the Fed’s reason for not publishing one.
These figures are not an update to the 2%/40% figures above, and must not be read as one. They are a different cut on three axes. The FEDS Note counts transfers at death; this counts recipient families, totalling up to four receipts and including trusts and substantial gifts, because that is what the survey question asks. It pools 1995–2016; this is 2022 alone. And the dollar thresholds are not inflation-matched between the two. They corroborate the same shape independently. Any sentence of the form “the Fed’s 2%/40% is now X” would be false.
Limits, stated plainly. No standard errors, so no figure here carries a margin of error. One wave only — nothing here says whether inheritances have risen or fallen. Amounts are as reported at the time of receipt, so they are not comparable across age groups without deflating, and older recipients received their money in much older dollars. And the survey question pools inheritance, trust and substantial gift into one, so these are transfers received, not bequests specifically. Same survey, different question: how many homeowners 65+ still owe on their home.
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.
One thing we could not reach: the interactive tool’s category list, which is rendered by JavaScript. It could in principle contain an inheritance statistic we did not see. The other gap is now closed — the SCF codebook’s variable-definitions section was read on 12 August 2026, and the inheritance variables are named in what the microdata says above. The Summary Extract still contains none of them.
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.