Average Inheritance by Age
in America: ~$46,200

The average (mean) inheritance in the United States is about $46,200, based on Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances data. The median is considerably lower, because a small number of very large inheritances pull the average up — the bottom half of recipients receive around $9,700 on average, while the top 1% of recipients average roughly $719,000. Most importantly, only about one in three US households ever receives an inheritance at all.

The median American receives their inheritance at about age 58 — not in their 20s or 30s. Most inheritances arrive between the mid-50s and mid-60s, and the bulk are received between roughly ages 46 and 75. The reason is simple: inheritance is overwhelmingly a later-life event, because parents are typically in their 70s, 80s or 90s when an estate passes. Planning around an expected inheritance to arrive early is usually a mistake.

For federal purposes, essentially all of it. Receiving an inheritance is not federally income-taxable to the heir, and the estate itself owes federal estate tax only on value above the 2026 exemption of $15 million per person ($30 million per married couple) — a threshold made permanent and inflation-indexed by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Above it, the rate is 40%. In practice more than 99% of estates owe no federal estate tax.

In 2026, five states levy an inheritance tax paid by the heir: Kentucky, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey and Pennsylvania (Iowa fully repealed its inheritance tax as of 1 January 2025). Rates and exemptions usually depend on how closely you were related to the deceased — spouses and often children are exempt or lightly taxed, while distant relatives and non-relatives pay more. This is separate from the 12 states plus DC that levy an estate tax on the estate itself.

Because inheritances are extremely right-skewed. A handful of very large transfers among the wealthiest families pull the mean far above what a typical heir receives. The bottom 50% of recipients average about $9,700 while the top 1% average roughly $719,000, so the ~$46,200 mean overstates the experience of most people. For a realistic benchmark, the typical (median) inheritance is a few tens of thousands of dollars, and most households inherit nothing.

The figures are drawn from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) — the same triennial survey used for our net-worth-by-age data — with the most recent full release covering 2022 (published October 2023). The Federal Reserve does not publish a single clean table of inheritance amount by recipient age, so this page reports the verified aggregate amounts and the well-documented timing of receipt (median age ~58) rather than inventing by-age dollar figures. The next SCF (2025) is expected in late 2026.