Nearly 5 Million Americans Have a Net Worth Of At Least $5 Million. Here’s Where They Are.
America’s wealthy are far more numerous, and more geographically spread out, than the billionaires and technology founders who dominate rich lists, with nearly 5 million U.S. households now holding a net worth of at least $5 million.
Many of those fortunes belong to owners of private businesses such as dental practices, car dealerships, restaurant chains, distributors and HVAC companies, economists Owen Zidar and Eric Zwick found after spending years examining U.S. Treasury and Internal Revenue Service data.
The researchers describe them as “everywhere millionaires” in their new book, The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There. About 3 million private business owners fall into that group, with average wealth of roughly $25 million, CBS News reported.
Collectively, these Main Street millionaires hold more than 13 times as much wealth as the Forbes 400, according to Zidar and Zwick’s research. More than 2 million U.S. households have net worths of at least $10 million, while about 65,000 are worth $100 million or more.
The findings come from research that began more than a decade ago when Zidar, now a professor at Princeton University and Zwick, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, worked with economist Danny Yagan to connect individual tax records with business filings at the Treasury Department.
That allowed the researchers to identify the people receiving profits from privately held businesses, a group that is less visible than executives of publicly traded companies. When they examined business profits among people in the top 1%, professions including doctors and auto dealers ranked prominently.
The research also found that about three-quarters of the wealthy business owners started their own companies rather than inheriting them, while the vast majority did not inherit their wealth. The typical member of the group is 62, married and somewhat more likely to have graduated from college than the general population.
Other fortunes identified by the researchers came from businesses including auto dealerships, medical practices, beer distribution, manufacturing and restaurant operations. Unlike publicly traded companies, many of those businesses do not routinely disclose revenue, profits or ownership stakes, making their owners’ wealth less visible.
Private business ownership becomes increasingly important higher up America’s income distribution. At the 90th percentile, roughly 90% of income comes from wages, while among the top 0.1%, wages account for about 40% and business income approaches half of total income, Zidar and Zwick wrote in a July analysis of their research.
The structure of those businesses also matters. Many operate as pass-through entities, including partnerships, S corporations and sole proprietorships, where business income generally flows through to owners and is reported on their individual tax returns rather than being subject first to corporate income tax.
Federal tax law provides another benefit through the qualified business income deduction. Eligible owners of pass-through businesses can deduct up to 20% of qualified business income, a provision created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and made permanent by the 2025 tax law. The deduction does not apply to ordinary wage income earned as an employee.
Zwick told CBS News that the tax treatment has contributed to wealth accumulation among these business owners over the past four decades. The IRS says the deduction applies to eligible income from businesses including sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations, although limits apply depending on income and the type of business.
The findings offer a different picture from another expanding group of wealthy Americans: retirement savers whose investment accounts have crossed the $1 million mark. Fidelity counted a record 769,000 401(k) millionaires in the second quarter, up 19% from the previous quarter, CBS News reported earlier this month.
Those gains followed a rebound in financial markets after an earlier selloff linked partly to the Iran war, but Zidar and Zwick are examining households with substantially greater overall wealth rather than retirement accounts alone. Their $5 million threshold placed a household in roughly the top 4% of U.S. household wealth as of 2022, according to the book.
The researchers also found that wealthy private business owners are spread across the country rather than being concentrated exclusively in financial and technology centers. A recent examination of the research by The New Yorker highlighted businesses ranging from car dealerships and medical practices to fast-food operations.
Their lifestyles are not necessarily modest. Zidar and Zwick found examples of owners spending their fortunes on large homes, yachts and other expensive purchases, distinguishing the group from the famously frugal millionaires described in the 1990s bestseller The Millionaire Next Door.
For many, however, the business remains their primary occupation well after they have accumulated substantial wealth. Zwick told CBS News that owners in their 50s and 60s often remain heavily involved in running their companies rather than retiring after reaching millionaire status.
