Everybody wants to know where they stand. Nobody asks out loud, which is exactly why the numbers going around are bad ones: an average picked up on a forum, a "you should have X times your salary by 40" imported from the United States, a sentence from a friend who read something somewhere.
INSEE publishes the real numbers. They come from the Histoire de vie et Patrimoine survey, which asks households directly what they own. Here is what they say, and more importantly what they do not.
Median gross wealth, bracket by bracket
Source: INSEE, Histoire de vie et Patrimoine survey 2023-2024 (Insee Focus n°371), amounts as of early 2024. GROSS wealth: the value of what the household owns, before deducting the mortgage still outstanding. Median: half the households in the bracket are below, half above.
Three things stand out.
The step between the under-30s and the next bracket is enormous: median wealth is multiplied by more than five. That is not a generation suddenly getting good at finance. It is mostly buying a home, which drops several hundred thousand euros of assets onto the balance sheet at once, against a loan that gross wealth does not subtract.
Then the curve flattens after 50. It does not collapse at retirement, contrary to what you often hear: median wealth for the 70-and-over bracket sits at the same level as for people in their fifties. Households draw down their capital far less than most people assume.
Finally, the median across all households is €205,100. If that number surprises you, the next point is probably why.
Trap one: the average is not the median, and the gap is vast
Wealth is one of the most unequally distributed quantities in French statistics. The ninth decile across all households sits at €857,700, more than four times the median. The 99th percentile is at €3,020,900, nearly fifteen times the median.
The arithmetic consequence: the average is dragged far up by the top of the distribution, and it describes almost nobody. The median describes exactly the household in the middle. It is the only useful marker when you want to place yourself.
Trap two: this is HOUSEHOLD wealth, not per-person wealth
INSEE counts the wealth of the entire household. A couple who pooled two careers and two saving capacities appears in the same table as a single person.
That changes everything. Comparing yourself to the 40-49 median while living alone means measuring yourself against households that hold more than one working person on average. The honest comparison accounts for family configuration: a childless couple, a single person and a single-parent family do not share a distribution, and the gap between them runs into tens of percent.
Trap three: gross is not net
Gross wealth adds up what you own. Net wealth subtracts what you owe.
For someone in their thirties who has just bought, the difference is dramatic: a €300,000 flat with €280,000 of mortgage left is €300,000 of gross wealth and €20,000 of net wealth. Both figures are true, they simply answer different questions. Comparing a net figure to a gross median is giving yourself a bad grade for nothing.
What these numbers do not measure at all
They do not measure trajectory. Two households at the same amount today, one putting aside €400 a month and the other nothing, are not in the same situation, and no median will ever see it.
They do not measure liquidity either. Wealth that is 90% the family home and wealth that is 90% financial assets produce the same figure and two very different lives on the day something unexpected happens.
And they obviously do not measure the cost of living where you are, or what you want the money for. Wealth is not a score. It is a means.
So what is comparing good for
One thing, but a useful one: calibrating your intuition. Most people believe they are far below their age bracket, because visible fortunes are overrepresented in what we read and nobody talks about their ordinary savings. Seeing the real figure corrects that distortion, in both directions.
What matters after that is not the gap to the median but the direction. Wealth below the median growing 15% a year beats comfortable wealth standing still, and that information exists in no national table.
Where IgniFI fits in
IgniFI places your wealth on this distribution automatically, based on your age and family configuration, and shows you the next rung. It is an estimate, presented as one: wealth surveys cannot resolve down to the percentile, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The marker is a starting point, not a target. What follows in the app is the trajectory: what you set aside, at what pace, and the date that gets you somewhere.