Net Worth Calculator

What this calculator answers

What you are worth on paper today: everything you own minus everything you owe. It also answers the questions that come right after the first number. How much of it is your home? What is it without the house and the car? How much could you reach quickly? How much of the 401(k) is really future income tax? Save a dated snapshot on this device and it also shows how the number changes from one month or year to the next.

How to use it

• Assets: one row for each account, property or vehicle. Type the value in dollars (385,000, $385,000 and 385k all work), choose the asset type, and add a name if it helps. Use what each would sell for today: the balance on your latest statement for accounts, a recent estimate for a home or a used-car price guide for a vehicle, not what you paid.
• Debts: one row for each mortgage, loan or card, with its balance: the amount it would take to pay it off today, from your latest statement, not the original loan amount. Leave the list empty if you owe nothing.
• Types matter for the other measures. “Home you live in” and “Home mortgage or HELOC” are set against each other, and so are “Vehicle” and “Auto loan”. Put a rental or vacation home under “Other real estate” and its loan under “Other real estate loan”. A traditional 401(k), 403(b) or IRA is “Pre-tax 401(k) or IRA”; Roth accounts have their own type because qualified Roth withdrawals are not taxed.
• Tax rate on retirement withdrawals (optional): the rate you expect to pay on money taken out of a traditional 401(k), 403(b) or IRA, for example 15. Leave it blank if you only want the plain total.

Results update as you type. Paste rows takes a list copied from a spreadsheet, with name, value and type in that order. The Try buttons load three other households, worked through below. Save for comparison keeps a result while you try a change, such as paying off the car with savings, and shows the difference. Continue in the Retirement Savings Calculator carries your retirement balances over as its starting savings. Continue in the FIRE Calculator carries your investments and retirement accounts as its invested assets: a FIRE plan is paid for by what you can draw on, not by your whole net worth, so the home and car stay behind.

How to calculate your net worth

Add up the value of everything you own, add up everything you owe, and subtract the second total from the first.

• $A$ is your total assets: the current value of your accounts, investments, retirement accounts, real estate, vehicles and anything else you could sell.
• $D$ is your total debts (liabilities): the payoff balance of every mortgage, loan, card and other debt.
• The debt-to-asset ratio is the share of what you own that is owed to lenders. Above 100% means you owe more than you own. It isn’t defined when you have no assets.

Worked example: $530,350 of assets and $325,250 of debts

A couple in their thirties own a home and have the accounts below. The calculator opens with these numbers.

1. Total assets: $16,000 of cash + $23,500 of investments + $88,000 in retirement accounts + $385,000 of real estate + $17,850 of vehicles = $530,350.00.
2. Total debts: $291,400 + $12,900 + $18,600 + $2,350 = $325,250.00.
3. Net worth: $530,350 − $325,250 = $205,100.00.
4. Debt-to-asset ratio: $325,250 ÷ $530,350 = 0.6133, or 61.33%. About $0.61 is owed for every $1 they own, almost all of it on the house.
5. Without the home and the car: the home equity is $385,000 − $291,400 = $93,600 and the car equity $17,850 − $12,900 = $4,950, so $205,100 − $93,600 − $4,950 = $106,550.00.
6. Liquid assets: $16,000 of cash + $23,500 in the brokerage account = $39,500.00.
7. With a 15% tax rate on withdrawals, about $68,300 × 0.15 = $10,245 of the 401(k) will go to income tax, so net worth after that tax is $194,855.00. The Roth IRA is not reduced.

What counts as an asset, and what doesn’t

An asset is anything you own that could be turned into money. The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances counts bank accounts, certificates of deposit, bonds, stocks and funds, retirement accounts, the cash value of whole life insurance, your home, other real estate, vehicles and business interests. Its debts are mortgages and home equity lines, loans on other property, credit card balances, vehicle and student loans, and other loans.

Some things feel like wealth but are left out, by the Fed’s survey and by this calculator unless you choose to list them:

• Income and future pay. A salary is money coming in, not something you own on a given date.
• Social Security and pensions that pay a monthly amount. The Fed leaves these out because putting a value on a future stream of payments takes assumptions about work, inflation and lifespan, and there are no widely agreed standards for them. Account-type plans such as a 401(k), 403(b) or IRA do count, at their balance.
• Household furnishings and everyday belongings, which the Census Bureau also leaves out. List an item under “Other asset” only if you could and would sell it, such as jewelry or collectibles. The Fed counts boats and RVs as vehicles.

Does net worth include your home, car or 401(k)?

Yes: the standard definition counts all three, at today’s value, with their loans subtracted. The Census Bureau’s wealth survey also reports homeowners’ wealth without home equity, though, and a home you live in and a car you drive to work aren’t money you can spend. That’s why the result shows four figures side by side:

• Net worth: everything you own minus everything you owe.
• Without home and vehicles: your net worth minus the equity in the home you live in and in your vehicles. Their loans leave with them, so an underwater car loan (owing more than the car is worth) raises this figure. Rental and vacation properties stay in.
• Liquid assets: cash and bank accounts plus investments outside retirement accounts, the money you can usually reach quickly.
• After tax on pre-tax accounts: traditional 401(k) and IRA money is taxed as income when you take it out, and qualified Roth withdrawals are not. With a tax rate entered, this figure subtracts that future tax from the pre-tax balances only.

Liquid net worth vs. total net worth

Liquid assets are the part of your net worth you could sell for cash quickly without a large fee: bank accounts, money market funds and investments in a regular brokerage account. A home is slow and costly to sell, and money taken out of a retirement account early is usually taxed and can owe an additional early-withdrawal tax. Definitions of “liquid net worth” vary: some subtract every debt from liquid assets, others only the debts due soon. So the calculator shows liquid assets on their own, and you can set them against whichever debts you want to compare. In the worked example, $39,500 of liquid assets would more than cover the $20,950 of student loan and credit card debt.

What a negative net worth means

A negative net worth means your debts are larger than the value of what you own. The Census Bureau’s wealth figures include negative values: a household with few assets and a heavy debt load can have negative wealth. It happens whenever debts such as student loans, a car loan or medical bills outweigh savings and property so far. The number doesn’t measure your income or your prospects. It moves toward zero with every payment on a balance and every dollar saved, and tracking it shows that progress.

Tracking your net worth over time (privately)

Net worth is most useful as a trend. Press Save snapshot to keep your lists and that date’s totals in this browser’s storage on this device. Nothing is saved until you press the button, nothing is sent anywhere, and share links are turned off for this calculator. Pick the snapshot’s date if you are entering figures from an earlier statement. Saving twice on the same date replaces that date’s snapshot.

Once a snapshot exists, the result shows the change since the latest one, split into assets and debts. It also shows a table of every snapshot, which you can download as a CSV file, and from two snapshots on, a chart. Load saved lists brings your saved rows back after you have tried other numbers, and Delete saved data removes the lists and every snapshot. Clearing your browser’s site data removes them too, so download the CSV if you want a copy.

Reading the result

• The headline is your net worth, with total assets and total debts under it.
• Debt-to-asset ratio shows your total debts as a share of total assets, also written as dollars owed for every $1 you own. It is not the debt-to-income ratio lenders use, which compares monthly debt payments with income.
• What you own and What you owe show each category’s share of the total.
• Net worth by category puts real estate next to its mortgages and vehicles next to their auto loans, so the Net column shows your equity in each. Other debts get rows of their own. The table downloads as a CSV file.
• Net worth if market values change repeats the calculation with investments, retirement accounts and real estate 10%, 20% or 30% lower, or 10% or 20% higher, while cash and every debt stay put. Debt magnifies these swings. In the worked example, a 10% fall in those values lowers net worth by $49,650.00 to $155,450.00, about a quarter, because the mortgage doesn’t fall with the house.

This page doesn’t compare your result with other people’s. If you look up survey figures by age, the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances runs every three years and reports both medians and means. The median is the better guide to a typical household, because a small number of very large fortunes pull the mean up.

Three other households

The Try buttons load these cases. Each keeps the example’s 15% tax rate.

• Just out of school: $2,600 in checking, a $3,400 401(k) and a $9,500 car, against $38,200 of student loans, a $7,800 car loan and a $1,450 card balance. Assets of $15,500 against debts of $47,450 give a net worth of −$31,950.00 and a debt-to-asset ratio of 306.13%.
• Renting, no debts: $27,300 in bank accounts, a $48,000 brokerage account, a $112,000 403(b), a $36,500 Roth IRA and a $14,000 car. Net worth is $237,800.00, the ratio is 0%, and liquid assets are $75,300. The 15% tax on the 403(b) brings it to $221,000.00.
• Retired, home paid off: $51,400 in bank accounts, a $486,000 traditional IRA, a $64,000 Roth IRA, a $410,000 home and a $21,000 car, with $900 on a card. Net worth is $1,031,500.00, or $600,500.00 without the home and car. At a 15% tax rate on withdrawals, $72,900 of the IRA is future tax, leaving $958,600.00.

Assumptions and limitations

• The result is only as current as the values you enter. Market prices, home values and balances keep changing.
• Selling costs are not subtracted: agent fees on a home, the cost of selling a car, and tax on investment gains would all lower what you keep.
• Retirement accounts count at their full balance in the headline. The optional tax estimate applies one rate to all pre-tax money and leaves out the additional tax on early withdrawals.
• Monthly-benefit pensions, Social Security, future income and household belongings are not assets here.
• Amounts are added exactly and rounded to the cent for display only.
• The result is an educational estimate, not financial, tax or legal advice.

Common mistakes

• Using what you paid instead of what it’s worth. Look up what the car would sell for today rather than its sticker price. The same goes for a home bought years ago, which may now be worth more or less than you paid.
• Entering the original loan amount. Use the payoff balance from your latest statement. After years of payments, a mortgage balance is well below the amount first borrowed.
• Subtracting the mortgage twice. List the home at its full value under Assets and the mortgage under Debts. Entering the home’s equity as its value while also listing the mortgage counts the loan twice.
• Adding your salary. Income isn’t an asset. Only the savings and investments it has already paid for count.
• Forgetting small debts. Card balances, buy-now-pay-later plans, medical bills and money owed to family all belong in the debts list.
• Treating every 401(k) dollar as spendable. A pre-tax balance still owes income tax on withdrawal. Enter a tax rate to see the difference.