How to Calculate Your Net Worth (and What It Should Be by Age)
By the Stoia team · June 8, 2026 · 7 min read
Net worth is the one number that summarizes your entire financial life: everything you own minus everything you owe. Income tells you what flows in; spending tells you what flows out; net worth tells you what has actually stuck. Here's how to calculate it correctly in about ten minutes — or instantly with our free net worth calculator.
The formula (and the two rules that keep it honest)
Net worth = total assets − total liabilities. Simple arithmetic — the judgment is in what you count and at what value.
- Rule 1: market value, not purchase price. Your house counts at what it would sell for today, not what you paid. Your car counts at resale value — which fell the moment you drove it home.
- Rule 2: payoff balance, not payment. Debts count at their remaining principal. The $480 car payment is irrelevant; the $13,200 still owed is what goes in the math.
What counts as an asset
- Cash: checking, savings, CDs, cash on hand.
- Investments: brokerage accounts, 401(k), IRA, HSA, RSUs you actually own, 529 plans.
- Crypto: exchange balances and wallets, at current prices.
- Real estate: your home and any rentals, at current market value (a rough online estimate is fine for tracking).
- Vehicles: resale value from KBB or similar.
- Other: business equity, valuable collectibles, money reliably owed to you.
Skip furniture, electronics, and clothes — resale value is a fraction of what you paid, and they add noise, not signal.
What counts as a liability
- Mortgage principal (and HELOC balances)
- Student loans
- Auto loans
- Credit card balances
- Personal loans, medical debt, buy-now-pay-later plans
A worked example
Maya, 34: home worth $380,000, retirement accounts $85,000, brokerage $22,000, savings $14,000, car worth $16,000. Assets: $517,000. Mortgage $291,000, student loans $18,500, car loan $9,800, credit cards $2,100. Liabilities: $321,400. Net worth: $195,600 — slightly above the median U.S. household, well above the median for her age.
Median net worth by age (U.S.)
From the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, the latest available — medians, which represent the typical household far better than averages:
| Age | Median net worth |
|---|---|
| Under 35 | ≈ $39,000 |
| 35–44 | ≈ $135,600 |
| 45–54 | ≈ $247,200 |
| 55–64 | ≈ $364,500 |
| 65–74 | ≈ $409,900 |
| 75+ | ≈ $335,600 |
Below the line for your age? So was almost everyone who's now above it. Negative net worth in your twenties and early thirties — student loans outweighing early savings — is a normal starting position, not a verdict.
Moving the number
Only three levers exist: earn more, spend less, and make the gap work harder. In practice the sequence that works for most people: kill high-interest debt first (the debt payoff calculator shows the fastest order and what it saves), automate investing so compounding gets decades to run (see it visually in the compound interest calculator), and keep an emergency fund so surprises don't undo the progress.
Then stop calculating and start tracking
A net worth number is a photo; the trend is the movie. Quarterly check-ins are enough to see whether the system works — and the chore disappears entirely when your accounts feed the number automatically. That's the core of what we're building with Stoia: banks, brokerage, crypto, real estate, and vehicles synced into one always-current net worth, launching in 2026. Meanwhile, here's how to assemble the full picture today.