America is more prosperous than ever.

U.S. household net worth reached a new peak at the end of 2024. The unemployment rate has levitated just above record lows for three years. The overall debt that households are carrying compared with the assets they own is also near a record low.

But even a land of plenty has its shortcomings, influencing both perceptions and realities of how Americans are doing.

The U.S. economy remains deeply unequal, with vast gaps in wealth and financial security persisting even as inflation has ebbed and incomes have risen. And data designed to capture the overall population may be obscuring challenges experienced by a broad range of Americans, especially those in the bottom half of the wealth or income spectrum.

The share of wealth held by families in the top 10% has reached 69%, while the share held by families in the bottom 50% is only 6%, according to the latest reading from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. (When future income claims from Social Security benefits are excluded, the bottom 50% hold only 3% of total wealth.)

And while wealth has risen for the less wealthy half of the population in recent years, much of the uptick has been locked up in what financial analysts call “illiquid assets” — gains in home prices and stock portfolios — which are not easily translated into cash to pay for bills and expenses that are much higher than they were a few years ago.

Although the bottom 50% holds only a 1% share of all financial market wealth, 6 in 10 adults report owning some amount of stock. A broad range of Americans may be frustrated by the inaccessibility of this illiquid wealth, said Daniel Sullivan, research director at the JPMorganChase Institute, which tracks the finances of millions of U.S. bank account holders.

Despite the growth in overall wealth, economic confidence among U.S. households has not returned to where it was before the pandemic. That was the case even before consumer sentiment readings — along with the stock market — were dampened by the prospect of an inflationary global trade war from President Donald Trump’s tariff campaign. But what is also striking in the data is the increasing gap in perceptions along income lines.

Over the past four years, the University of Michigan’s monthly survey of consumer sentiment has shown those in the bottom two-thirds of income to be deeply pessimistic about the economy — with rock-bottom ratings more common during periods of deep recession, including the 2008 financial crisis.

In contrast, sentiment among the top third of earners recently rebounded after falling from prepandemic levels.

“Higher-income people drive most of aggregate spending,” said Joanne Hsu, an economist and director of the Michigan survey. “They were on an upward surge of sentiment between 2022 and 2024, and that’s consistent with their strong spending.”

In a recent report, Matt Bruenig, president of the People’s Policy Project, a liberal think tank, evaluated the long-running question in U.S. economics of how many adults are living paycheck to paycheck — a term plagued, he said, by “inherent ambiguities.”

Drawing on data from the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, conducted annually by the Federal Reserve Board, Bruenig noted that “if we define someone as living paycheck to paycheck if they either say they do not have three months of emergency savings or say they cannot afford a $2,000 emergency expense,” then 59% of American adults are “living paycheck to paycheck.”

One force behind the lingering dour mood may be more psychic, more intangible, than economic data can easily detect, according to Chris Wheat, president of the JPMorganChase Institute.

Less wealthy Americans, both middle and working class, he said, may still be reckoning with “the psychological effect” of the volatility brought about by the pandemic and postpandemic period of 2020 to 2023, which brought positive and negative swings in cash savings.

Lump sums of direct federal aid in 2020 and 2021 helped tens of millions of households pay down debts, save more of their income and get a brief taste of what living standards were like well above their usual income.

That aid, as expected, ended. And there has been a harsh comedown from those highs.

Inflation-adjusted income and inflation-adjusted spending for the typical household fell significantly from 2021 to 2023, research from the JPMorganChase Institute found, using data from more than 8 million bank account holders. In essence, purchasing power decreased.

During the same period, checking account balances remained in a historically healthy position across all income cohorts. Yet cash savings have fallen since peaking in 2021.

A variety of goods and services have become more expensive, “but people’s spending habits didn’t change,” Wheat said.

When financial gravity resumed, lower- and middle-income households that had received aid were forced to resume relying primarily on their labor income to cover expenses.

That, Wheat said, appears to have prompted a serious case of what both psychologists and economists call “loss aversion” — the human proneness to more painfully feel what has been lost than to notice what has been gained. The earnings growth that most workers captured, to average hourly earnings of $31 in January 2025 from $23 in January 2019, didn’t feel as good as inflation felt bad.