Why The Latino Share of National Wealth Is Shrinking

Progressive Tax Reform is Needed to Address Growing Concentration of Riches

You may have heard of the “wealth gap”: the widening and troubling divide between those at the top of the economic pyramid and all of us below. Another way to measure economic inequality is by race and ethnicity. Centuries of discrimination have left certain groups, such as Blacks and Latinos, with a smaller share of our nation’s total wealth. Those shares should be increasing with social progress, but the opposite is happening.

Latino wealth as a share of national wealth shrank by over 20% from 2016 to 2025, according to a new analysis by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) of Federal Reserve data. The Latino share of national wealth stood at 2.9% in the third quarter of 2016, shortly before President Trump took office for the first time; and at just 2.3% in the third quarter of 2025, near the end of his first year back in office.

Percentage shares of national wealth may seem like an abstract concept. Another, more concrete way to look at it is this: if the Latino wealth share had remained constant over that period, Latino families would be a trillion dollars richer today. That works out to almost $60,000 per family of four. Latinos make up nearly 20% of the American population.

The relative wealth of Latinos is shrinking in part because Latino wealth growth is considerably lagging that of white households. The inflation-adjusted wealth of the average white household grew by over a third (34%) between 2016 and 2025, but the average Latino household’s wealth grew by only 12%, little more than a third as much. (The Latino share of national wealth remained flat during the Biden administration.) Also, while the share of national wealth held by Black households has similarly shrunk, the “other” category of racial and ethnic communities has gained in relative wealth.

The record of Latino growth in two important wealth categories–corporate stock and private business–is even worse. Adjusted for inflation, Latino households hold about 25 percent less wealth in stocks in 2025 compared to 2016. And on an inflation-adjusted basis, Latino ownership of private businesses has not grown at all since 1989, the year the Federal Reserve began tracking household wealth.

The total wealth of all Latino families, made up of 18.7 million households, is less than 20% of the total wealth of the nation’s richest 0.1%, which consists of just 136,000 households, only a tiny percentage of which are Latino.

Future Latino wealth growth will likely be slowed by the Trump-GOP tax-and-spending law enacted last year. That law cut taxes by trillions of dollars mostly for the wealthy–a group in which Latinos are underrepresented–and partially paid for them with cuts to healthcare and nutrition aid. Losing those benefits will strain Latino family budgets and make it all the more difficult to build wealth.

The bad news on relative wealth comes on the heels of earlier ATF reports on the collapse of Latino job growth in 2025 and the average net financial loss workers in heavily Latino industries will suffer from the combination of GOP tax and service cuts and President Trump’s erratic tariff policy.

Reversing this trend of relative Latino wealth loss requires progressive tax reform that uses the revenue raised to lower costs and increase opportunities for workers and families to build wealth. There are many tools available to more closely equalize the wealth of Latino households with that of white households, including a wealth tax, a billionaires income tax, capital gains reform and a restored estate tax.

The details of each reform vary (wealth and estate taxes place a levy on the fortunes of the ultrarich, while a billionaires income tax and capital gains reform address only the increase in those fortunes) but they all share a common basis. That is the recognition that wealth and power tend to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands and that it takes public action to redistribute those precious gifts more equitably.

Once we start doing that, the wealth share of Latino families will naturally rise to match their presence in our national community and contribution to our national project.