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America’s richest families are now the most likely to have more than two kids, according to a new report — flipping decades of demographics on their head.
About half of the 1% richest Americans have three or more kids — the highest portion of any tax bracket, according to a recent analysis of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances.
That’s compared to 40% of the rest of US households that have three or more kids, according to an analysis by left-leaning nonprofit Economic Security Project found.
The average cost of raising a child in the US is $300,000 — and that doesn’t include college tuition. That means an extra kid could take years to afford for the median US family, which makes $87,000 a year.
But for the top 1%, who earn at least $660,000 annually, that figure is a lot less prohibitive. Include the net worth for these folks — at least $13.7 million — and it becomes a rounding error.
Mike Konczal, vice president of the think tank that carried out the analysis, told the Washington Post that for many, the cost of children “is a huge concentrated expense.
“A third kid is a much harder accounting problem,” Konczal told the outlet.
The news represents a reversal of longtime demographic trends in which the number of kids in households grew as families moved farther down the socio-economic ladder.
A 2018 study focusing on white mothers carried out by researchers at San Francisco State University and Tel Aviv University found that in 1980, the richer the woman, the less likely she was to have more children.
But 30 years later, the rich tended toward being more likely to have three children, as did poorer women, while middle-class moms typically had only two.
The analysis’s conclusion comes as many Americans say that they want to have more children.
Around 42% of Americans say they’d ideally like to have three or more children, according to a Gallup poll from 2025, with data showing they want an average of 2.7 offspring.
However, the average is 1.6 children per woman.
Elliot Haspel, senior fellow at family policy think tank Capita, told The Washington Post that the cost is almost certainly to blame.
“[P]arents or couples are not having the number of children that they want — not due to an inability to conceive but due to the fact that they can’t afford it,” Elliot Haspel said.
