Households are more invested in stocks than ever
The four-quarter average of household equity allocation reached 46.0% in Q1, the highest in the 33-year Federal Reserve series. The current quarterly reading is 45.8%, just below the 46.7% raw peak in Q4 2025, but smoothing out that quarterly price move leaves the underlying allocation at a record. The dot-com high was 38.7%.
This gauge moves slowly and cannot time the market. Equity prices themselves lift the share even if households do nothing, and post-2006 retirement auto-enrollment makes the 2000 comparison imperfect. Still, a historically large slice of household financial assets is already in stocks, which has tended to mean lower long-horizon returns without scheduling a market decline.
Household equity allocation — full history, current release, and the long-horizon context
This chart is a frozen capture — the numbers above are as of Q1 2026 (Fed Z.1) and will not update. The live page recomputes daily from the same dataset. A square version of this chart is available for feeds that crop landscape images.
