By Alex Camardelle-Floyd, Ph.D.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that “to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” In the United States, the land of dollars has a ledger. Every three years the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances records what American families own, owe, and earn, and the 2025 results, released October 9, 2026, show that the typical Black family lost a quarter of its wealth between 2022 and 2025. Median net worth for Black non-Hispanic families fell 25 percent, from $49,100 to $36,800, a loss of $12,300 in inflation-adjusted dollars. The survey measures net worth as of the interview, and most interviews took place between April and December 2025, so these figures describe Black family balance sheets during the first year of the current administration.
A family’s net worth is the accumulated result of decisions by Congress, federal agencies, lenders, employers, and appraisers about who may borrow, who may own, who may keep a job, and whose property is valued at its worth. Those decisions can eliminate disadvantage or reproduce it. For Black families between 2022 and 2025, they reproduced it, and a series of federal policy choices made in 2025 acted through the same channels the survey shows are draining wealth.
What the 2025 survey shows
According to the latest survey, Black families are the only group that lost wealth. Median net worth for White non-Hispanic families rose 6 percent to $332,100 over the same period, and median net worth for Hispanic or Latino families rose 18 percent to $79,600. The Fed’s own summary states that the Black decline reverses the gains recorded in every survey since 2013, and that as a result the median White family now holds nine times the wealth of the median Black family, the widest ratio since 2016. In dollars, the gap between the median White family and the median Black family is $295,300. Mean net worth for Black families rose 5 percent, which means the small number of Black families with substantial assets gained while the typical family lost: inequality widened within Black America at the same time it widened between Black and White America.
The survey tracks the mechanics of financial strain and finds most households at the bottom of the income and wealth distribution are worse off today. The share of families behind on a loan payment rose from 12.2 percent to 19.6 percent, the highest since 2010. Median net worth for families in the bottom quarter of the wealth distribution fell from $3,800 to $1,700. Renters lost 7 percent of their median wealth. The share of families carrying a buy now, pay later balance rose from 7 percent to 12 percent. Black families are overrepresented in each of these categories.
The South concentrates these conditions. Kindred Futures’ 2025 report Roots of Wealth: Unearthing Black Prosperity in the South found that the median White household in the South holds 24 times the wealth of the median Black household, and that in Arkansas the median White family holds about $70,000 against $2,000 for the median Black family. Nearly two million Black households in the South have zero or negative net worth.
Five federal decisions eroding Black wealth
The decisions below were enacted by Congress or issued by federal agencies in 2025. None was adopted with race as its stated purpose. That is the point: race-neutral policy design is not neutral when people start from unequal positions. It shifts the burden of structural disadvantage onto individual households, then measures those households against outcomes that the design predetermined.
The 2025 reconciliation act, or One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Congress enacted the budget reconciliation law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, 2025. The Congressional Budget Office’s distributional analysis of the final law estimates that households in the lowest tenth of the income distribution will lose about $1,200 per year on average between 2026 and 2034, or 3.1 percent of their income, mainly through reduced Medicaid and SNAP benefits, while households in the highest tenth will gain about $13,600 per year, or 2.7 percent of income, mainly through lower taxes. Black Americans make up roughly 20 percent of Medicaid enrollees and 27 percent of SNAP participants against about 14 percent of the population, so the in-kind losses concentrate among Black families by construction. The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found that the law’s business preferences (the Section 199A deduction, bonus depreciation, and estate tax relief) accrue mainly to high-wealth households while the refundable credits that reach Black workers were left unchanged. A family that loses health coverage absorbs medical costs as debt, and a family that loses food assistance spends down whatever savings it has. The survey’s rise in late payments and in buy now, pay later balances is a telling indicator.
The withdrawal of consumer financial protections.
In 2025 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Congress removed several protections that governed how fees and debts reach household balance sheets. Congress nullified the Bureau’s overdraft rule under the Congressional Review Act, which the Bureau had estimated would save consumers about $5 billion a year by capping fees at large banks. The Bureau joined lender trade groups in asking a federal court to vacate its rule barring medical debt from credit reports, and the court did so. The Bureau announced it would not prioritize enforcement of the Section 1071 rule requiring lenders to report small business lending to minority-owned firms, and it rescinded 67 guidance documents and cut examinations by half. Each of these protections impacts a known channel of Black wealth loss. Medical debt on a credit report lowers a credit score, which raises the price of subsequent loans families may take out. Overdraft fees fall hardest on families with the lowest cash balances, and the survey shows the median transaction account balance fell 6 percent to $8,200. Without Section 1071 data, regulators cannot document whether Black-owned firms are denied credit at higher rates, leaving denial unexamined.
The devaluation of Black-held property
Home equity is the principal asset of Black families that hold any wealth at all, and in 2025 the federal government withdrew the instruments built to protect its valuation. In March 2025 the Department of Housing and Urban Development rescinded three mortgagee letters that had required FHA appraisers to follow fair housing standards and had given borrowers a formal path to request reconsideration of a low appraisal, and on July 10, 2025, HUD and the Office of Management and Budget disbanded the interagency Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity task force. HUD had separately terminated the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. On April 23, 2025, Executive Order 14281 directed every federal agency to deprioritize enforcement of disparate impact liability in housing and lending, the legal standard under which a lending or appraisal practice that produces unequal outcomes can be challenged without proof of intent. Research from the Brookings Institution has documented that homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are valued below comparable homes elsewhere.
The removal of Black workers from federal employment
The federal government has been the largest single employer of Black Americans since 1912, and even through the decades when President Wilson segregated its departments, published pay scales and codified promotion rules made it a more reliable path into the middle class than private employment. In 2025 the administration eliminated roughly 271,000 federal positions through firings, deferred resignation offers, and hiring freezes. Black Americans held nearly 19 percent of federal jobs against about 13 percent of the labor force, and the Economic Policy Institute found that the losses fell disproportionately on Black women, whose employment-to-population ratio fell from 59.5 percent in 2024 to 57.9 percent through August 2025 while the ratios for White women and Black men held steady. Black women lost 95,371 federal jobs in 2025, about a third of the total contraction. The Black unemployment rate reached 8.2 percent in November 2025, the highest since August 2021, and stood at 7.0 percent in September 2026, roughly double the rate for White workers. EPI’s Valerie Wilson described the pattern plainly: “There is something unique happening to Black women in particular.” A displaced federal worker who draws down a retirement account and carries expenses on a credit card converts an employment shock into a wealth loss, and the survey records both the drawdown and the balance.
The retreat from inclusion initiatives
Three executive orders issued in the first quarter of 2025 withdrew the federal infrastructure that had channeled capital and contracts toward Black-owned firms. Executive Order 14173 revoked Executive Order 11246, which since 1965 had required federal contractors to maintain affirmative action plans, and Executive Order 14151 directed agencies to close equity offices and terminate equity-related grants. Executive Order 14238 directed the Minority Business Development Agency, the only federal agency dedicated to minority business growth, and the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund to reduce their operations to the statutory minimum; nearly all of MBDA’s roughly 50 employees were laid off and every business center agreement was terminated before a federal court enjoined the order in May 2025 and vacated the agency’s actions in November 2025. The Joint Center estimates that these actions threaten $10 billion to $15 billion a year in federal support for Black-owned firms. The survey shows the result at the household level: the real value of privately held businesses fell for families in the bottom 90 percent of income, with the mean decrease around $59,000, or 18 percent, for the bottom half, while it rose for the top tenth.
What should happen now
The decisions above can be reversed, and where the federal government has withdrawn, states and institutions in the South can act in its place.
First, Congress should restore the measurement and enforcement infrastructure that made Black wealth loss measurable, visible, and contestable. Congress should direct the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to implement the Section 1071 small business lending data rule on its original schedule and should codify the prohibition on medical debt in credit reports. Congress should enact the Appraisal Modernization Act, which would codify the reconsideration-of-value process in statute, and condition FHA lender eligibility on compliance, so a lender that denies a borrower the right to contest a low appraisal loses access to FHA insurance until it remediates. Disclosure without consequence has already been tried; the 2025 survey is the record of what happened when the disclosure was switched off.
Second, Southern states should legislate where federal protection has lapsed. State legislatures should adopt disparate impact standards in state fair housing and fair lending law, because Executive Order 14281 changes federal enforcement priorities but does not change state law. States should enact the baby bonds legislation already introduced in Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina, which give every child a publicly funded account at birth and give the children of the two million Southern Black households with no wealth a first asset. State treasurers should deposit public funds in community development financial institutions and Black-owned banks on the condition that those institutions report lending by race, and state banking regulators should cap interest rates on payday and title loans at 36 percent or lower. The Fed’s own data can make the case: the bottom fifth of families lost vehicles, lost cash balances, and fell behind on payments while the top tenth gained.
Conclusion
The 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances records a year in which the typical American family gained a little wealth, the wealthiest families gained a great deal, and the typical Black family lost a quarter of what it had. The decisions of 2025 did not create the racial wealth divide; the divide was built over four centuries, through enslavement, exclusion from the New Deal and the G.I. Bill, redlining, and the appraisal and lending practices that continued after those policies formally ended. What the decisions of 2025 did was remove, one by one, the instruments a prior generation of policy had built to interrupt that history.
The racial wealth divide was built by policy, and it can be narrowed by policy; the question the 2025 survey leaves open is not whether Black wealth can grow in the South but who will do the work. Kindred Futures and its partners across the region are doing it, and they invite every policymaker, funder, and institution that has read these numbers to join them.
