A "liquid millionaire" is someone who can spend a million dollars, right now. They might own stocks, bonds, cash, or other easily sold assets. This is in contrast to someone who has a million dollar networth, but their wealth is tied up in private equity, retirement accounts, or real estate, especially their primary residence.
CNBC says the USA has 6 million individual liquid millionaires: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/united-states-millionaires-billionaires-wealthy.html
Their source: https://www.henleyglobal.com/publications/usa-wealth-report-2025/usa-vs-w10
If the average household size is 2.5, so that's only 2.4M households, or 1.8% of the 132M households in the USA.
On the other hand, this famous networth percentile calculator: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator/
Suggests a million dollars, ignoring home equity, only gets you into the top 12.5%.
Which number do you think is correct? Or are they both correct and that the difference is mostly retirement accounts and business owners? That just doesn't seem likely to me because most people with high networths are of retirement age and have access to those accounts.
So how many of you millionaires are out there?
Number of Liquid Millionaire Households in USA
byu/Delicious_Soup_Salad infinancialindependence
Posted by Delicious_Soup_Salad
7 Comments
Well you did your household math wrong for starters
This isn’t really worth thinking about. How is this useful?
There’s going to be an enormous gap between millionaires and liquid millionaires. Retirement accounts make up a huge portion of most people’s assets.
If I had a million dollars in liquid I would want that liquid to be bourbon.
10%
Retirement accounts are just as liquid as any other brokerage account. Why make a distinction?
Just going off of what you said, one excludes retirement accounts but the other only excludes home equity. That’s a substantial difference