The Federal Reserve Board's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) collects information about family incomes, net worth, balance sheet components, credit use, and other financial outcomes. 1 The 2016 SCF reveals broad-based gains in income and net worth since the previous time the survey was conducted, in 2013. 2 During the three years between the beginning of the 2013 and 2016 surveys, real gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.2 percent, the civilian unemployment rate fell from 7.5 percent to 5 percent, and the annual rate of change in the consumer price index averaged 0.8 percent. 3 These changes in aggregate economic performance led to broadbased income gains across many different types of families. Several observations from the SCF about family incomes stand out: 4 ‰ Between 2013 and 2016, median family income grew 10 percent, and mean family income grew 14 percent (figure 1). ‰ Families throughout the income distribution experienced gains in average real incomes between 2013 and 2016, reversing the trend from 2010 to 2013, when real incomes fell or remained stagnant for all but the top of the income distribution. ‰ Families at the top of the income distribution saw larger gains in income between 2013 and 2016 than other families, consistent with widening income inequality. ‰ Families without a high school diploma and nonwhite and Hispanic families experienced larger proportional gains in incomes than other families between 2013 and 2016, although more-educated families and white non-Hispanic families continue to have higher incomes than other families. The improvements in economic activity along with rising house and corporate equity prices combined to support increases in average and median family net worth (wealth) between 2013 and 2016 after both measures remained stagnant between 2010 and 2013. The national CoreLogic Home Price Index increased at an annual rate of 6.5 percent between 1 See box 1, "The Data Used in This Article," for a general description of the SCF data. The appendix to this article provides a summary of key technical aspects of the survey. 2 For a detailed discussion of the 2013 survey as well as references to earlier surveys, see

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New data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) show that long-standing and substantial wealth disparities between families in different racial and ethnic groups were little changed since the last survey in 2016; the typical White family has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times the wealth of the typical Hispanic family.