Net Worth Calculator

Assets are anything you own that has cash value. The common categories are liquid cash (checking and savings), investments held outside retirement (brokerage accounts, stocks, bonds), retirement accounts (a 401k or IRA), the current market value of your home and any other property, the resale value of vehicles, and other valuables such as a business stake or collectibles. Use realistic market values, not what you paid or what you hope to get.

Liabilities are the balances you still owe. The usual categories are your remaining mortgage, auto loans, student loans, credit card debt, and any other personal or medical debt. Enter the payoff balance today, not the original loan amount. The gap between your total assets and total liabilities is your net worth.

Home equity is already handled correctly here, so you do not enter it separately. You put in the full home value as an asset and the full mortgage balance as a liability, and the difference between them, your equity, becomes part of net worth on its own. The debt-to-asset ratio shown next to your result is total debt divided by total assets, where a lower ratio means you owe less against what you own.

The categories follow the standard accounting split. FASB Concepts Statement No. 8, Chapter 4 (December 2021) defines an asset as a present right of an entity to an economic benefit and a liability as a present obligation to transfer one. For a household, a present right means something you could sell or draw on today: the brokerage account, the condo, the car. A pension that will pay you monthly but has no cash-out balance is future income, not a balance you can list, so it stays off this sheet. Expected inheritances and next year's salary are not present rights either.

If you want a checklist so nothing gets missed, IRS Form 433-A, the Collection Information Statement for Wage Earners and Self-Employed Individuals, is a thorough one. Its personal asset section walks through bank accounts, investments and retirement accounts, real property, vehicles, and other assets, and for each line it asks for the current fair market value, the loan balance against it, and the equity left over. One difference from this calculator: when the IRS values assets for collection, the Internal Revenue Manual (IRM 5.8.5) normally sets quick sale value at 80% of fair market value. This page uses full market value, so it will report a higher figure than a lender or the IRS would credit you with in a forced sale.

Comparison figures you see online almost always trace back to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. The SCF is a triennial survey sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board and fielded by NORC at the University of Chicago, and it defines net worth the same way this page does: total assets minus total debt. Two methodology points matter when you compare yourself to it. It combines an area-probability sample with a list sample drawn from tax records to oversample wealthy families, which is one reason the mean sits far above the median in every age group. And each release describes finances as of its survey year, so the dollar figures age quickly, which is why we keep them in the linked guide rather than on this page. Compare against the median for your age bracket, not the mean, and treat it as context rather than a target.