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By Shane Croucher
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In 2018, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis asked whether Americans born in the 1980s would become a “lost generation.”
Two years earlier, the typical household headed by someone from that decade had 34 percent less wealth than earlier generations’ experience predicted for its age.
Fast-forward to 2024 and two of the same researchers ran the numbers again. By 2022, the typical 1980s household held 37 percent more wealth than the benchmark.
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This surprising reversal has done little to dislodge the belief that millennials are the first American generation to do worse than their parents.
That belief was built on data gathered at low points. And they were pretty low: the sluggish recovery after the 2008 global financial crisis and the first shock of the pandemic.
Measured against earlier generations at the same age, millennials now earn more and, by several measures, have caught up on wealth.
The exception is the milestone the old story got right: owning a home.
The Familiar Story
The pessimism was not imagined by a generation that defines itself by anxieties and overthinking. It comes from serious research.
Economist Raj Chetty and colleagues found that roughly 90 percent of Americans born in 1940 earned more at 30 than their parents had at the same age. For those born in the 1980s, it was a coin flip.
The St. Louis Fed’s 2018 study supplied the wealth side of millennials’ sorry tale.
Of the six birth cohorts it tracked, only the 1980s group lost further ground between 2010 and 2016, even as rising asset prices lifted older families.
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Its members carried unusually heavy debts—student, auto, and credit card loans that bought no appreciating assets—and so missed the rebound in homes and stocks.
By January 2020, CNN was reporting in glum tones that many millennials were worse off than their parents, “a first in American history.”
Then the pandemic struck. That spring, The Washington Post labeled them “the unluckiest generation in U.S. history,” calculating that no other had seen slower economic growth after entering the workforce.
The damage, it predicted, would follow them for life: in their earnings, their wealth, and their path to owning a home. The verdict seemed final. Then came the millennial spring.
What’s Really Going On
The familiar story got the start right. It got the trajectory wrong.
Chetty’s coin flip stops with Americans born in 1984, measured at 30—in 2014, five years into a weak recovery. It also compares people with their own parents, not with the generation before them.
In an April study in the journal Demography, Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute and Jeff Larrimore of the Federal Reserve Board compared five generations at ages 36 to 40.
After taxes and government benefits, and adjusting for inflation and household size, millennials’ median household income was 20 percent higher than Gen X’s at the same age.
Gen X had beaten the boomers by 16 percent. Millennials’ higher net college costs, the authors calculate, are offset by less than three years of their midcareer income advantage.
Wealth turned later, and faster. The St. Louis Fed traced most of the 1980s cohort’s leap to housing and called 2022 “stellar but unusual.”
But the Fed’s newest Survey of Consumer Finances, released October 9, suggests the gains have held so far: median net worth for households headed by 35-to-44-year-olds, now almost all millennials, rose 5 percent after inflation from 2022 to 2025, to $155,600.
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Not all research agrees. A 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Moritz Kuhn and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull, drawing on the same 2022 data, finds that younger generations accumulate less wealth than their predecessors at comparable ages.
And housing remains the weak flank. Homeownership among 35-to-44-year-olds was 61 percent in 2022, down from 66 percent in 1989, Corinth and Larrimore note.
The Fed now estimates that payments on a mortgage for the median home would eat about a third of median family income, a record for the modern survey.
But the millennial mythology about their own downtrodden fate is becoming just that: myth. Millennials themselves are less gloomy than the story told about them.
In a 2023 Federal Reserve survey, 49 percent said they were better off financially than their parents had been at the same age, against 56 percent of boomers, according to Corinth and Larrimore’s analysis.
If the rest of the generation, still arriving in its late 30s, fails to match its elders’ lead over Gen X, or a housing slump erases the paper gains, then perhaps there’s still some truth to the old story.
But for now, the generation that was supposed to be lost has found its way—everywhere but its own front door.
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