The Great Wealth Transfer

Contents

1. The estimates and how they grew
2. Why the money moves slowly
3. What never reaches the heirs
4. Who inherits what
5. Omaha and the preparation of heirs

Brent O’Mara works with business owners and multigenerational families, and the phrase that hangs over every conversation with the second group has a birthday. In 1999 two researchers at Boston College, Paul Schervish and John Havens, published a study estimating that at least $41 trillion would pass from one generation of Americans to the next between 1998 and 2052, a figure CNBC later recalled as hailed in wealth management and philanthropy circles and doubted elsewhere.³ Every larger number since has been a revision of that one, and the doubts have been revised with it.

The estimates and how they grew

The Boston College center returned in 2014 with a projection of $59 trillion passing to heirs, charities and taxes between 2007 and 2061: $36 trillion to heirs, $5.6 trillion to federal estate taxes and more than $27 trillion to charity, on an assumption of two percent economic growth.³ A decade later the numbers came from a Boston research company instead. WealthManagement.com summarized its 2024 report as projecting $124 trillion changing hands by 2048, with $105 trillion of it going to heirs, and observed that the end date keeps being pushed back.⁶ Fortune explained the June 2025 update of nearly $124 trillion over 25 years by three forces: restating an earlier $84 trillion estimate from 2020 dollars into 2023 dollars lifted it to $100 trillion; total household wealth rose from $108 trillion to $154 trillion between 2020 and 2023 as asset prices climbed; and older households now hold a larger share of national wealth, 61 percent in 2023 against 54 percent three years earlier.² The Urban Institute uses the same $124 trillion by 2048 and calls it the largest intergenerational transfer in history.⁷

Figure

What a typical boomer household holds

boomer households in 2022

$432,200

households of the same age in 2001

$335,900

households of the same age in 1983

$185,300

share of all boomer wealth held by the top tenth of boomer households

71 percent

Why the money moves slowly

The Wall Street Journal put the point in its headline: Americans aged 55 and up control most of the country’s wealth, about $110 trillion by Federal Reserve data, and many of them have decades of living left, so their heirs may not see the money anytime soon.¹ The 2024 report adds a second delay. Roughly $54 trillion of the projected total will pass first to spouses before it moves down a generation, and about $40 trillion of that to newly widowed women; the spouses in question are mostly boomers themselves, so the money changes hands within the generation before it leaves it.⁶ Fortune’s account of the 2025 update calls these horizontal transfers and estimates that more than 28 million women will become the chief managers of their families’ assets as they outlive their husbands, with an average transfer between spouses of $1.4 million. Only afterward does the money move down a generation, and the 2025 report splits that stage by cohort: Generation X is projected to inherit nearly $1.4 trillion a year over the following decade, more than any other group, while over the full quarter century millennials receive the largest share, $45.6 trillion against $39 trillion for Generation X.² Pew’s labor force data, covered under the wave of retiring business owners, describe the same generation working later than its predecessors.

What never reaches the heirs

A July 2026 analysis by a payments company’s economics unit, reported by a trade magazine for advisers, starts from the $93 trillion that boomers alone hold and subtracts in turn: more than $4 trillion of debt, which brings the total to $88 trillion; the top one percent of households, whose wealth tends to end in charitable foundations, which leaves $60 trillion; the cost of a long retirement, including housing, health care and long term care, which leaves $44 trillion; and taxes, fees and lifetime giving, which leave about $36 trillion for heirs over twenty years. Its chief economist said the company had toyed with calling it the not so great wealth transfer, and the report found that roughly three quarters of the prospective heirs already rank in the wealthiest tenth of Americans.⁴ The skeptics are older than the study. CNBC’s 2014 report recalled a 2011 analysis by economists at New York University and the Bureau of Labor Statistics that found little evidence of an inheritance boom, noting that the share of households reporting a wealth transfer fell by 2.5 percentage points between 1989 and 2007.³

Figure

How one study shrinks the boomer total to what heirs receive

• Boomer wealth93
• After debt88
• Excluding the top 1 percent60
• After retirement spending44
• After taxes, fees and giving36

Who inherits what

The averages conceal the distribution. A second Urban Institute report notes that the baby boom generation makes up one third of households but holds more than half of total wealth, and argues that the transfer stands to lock in racial wealth gaps for generations because homeownership drives so much of what is passed on.⁸ The institute’s 2026 analysis of a long running federal health and retirement survey found that spouses and children are the main heirs but that amounts differ sharply by race: Black families received a median inheritance five to six times smaller than white families, about $9,500 against $60,000 for spouses and $20,000 against $100,000 for children. Among older adults without children, 41 percent passed wealth to nieces, nephews, cousins or close nonbiological kin, with median transfers of about $80,000; and money also runs upward, since 18 percent of Black older adults and 16 percent of Hispanic older adults had received more than $500 from their adult children in the two years before death, against 13 percent overall.⁷ Pew Research Center adds that boomer wealth, about $77 trillion in 2022, is concentrated: the top tenth of boomer households held 71 percent of it, and the generation’s advantage over earlier cohorts of older Americans belongs to its college educated households, while boomers with some college had lower median wealth than similarly educated older adults in 2001. A boomer household headed by someone with a bachelor’s degree or more had a median net worth of $1,077,200 in 2022, and Pew notes that the generation’s overall wealth reflects both the fortunes of those college educated households and the sheer number of boomer households.¹⁰

Figure

Median inheritances by recipient and race

median inheritance to spouses, white families against Black families

$60,000 against $9,500

median inheritance to children, white families against Black families

$100,000 against $20,000

of older adults without children who passed wealth to nieces, nephews, cousins or close nonbiological kin

41 percent

median transfer to those extended relatives

$80,000

Omaha and the preparation of heirs

The local projection arrived early. In January 2020 the Omaha World Herald reported an estimated $30 billion of wealth transferring within Douglas County by 2050, against a national figure then quoted as up to $50 trillion over thirty years, and quoted the interim president of the Omaha Community Foundation expecting a higher than usual share of it to be given to philanthropy in a metro area with more than 3,000 nonprofits; the foundation had by then helped more than 100 local advisers earn a designation in charitable planning through a class it ran with a local adviser.⁹ The question of whether heirs are ready is a research subject of its own. The same trade magazine cites a twenty year study of 3,200 families by a wealth consultancy which found that 70 percent of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation and 90 percent by the third, and attributed 60 percent of those failures to a lack of communication and trust within the family and 25 percent to heirs unprepared to manage an inheritance; a separate national survey found two thirds of givers admitting they had put off the conversation, and only 54 percent of beneficiaries saying they felt very prepared.⁵ The mechanics of one common asset in the handoff are covered under inherited retirement accounts, the family side under family meetings, and the earliest preparation under teaching children about money.

Where the evidence is strongest is at the bottom of the pile, not the top. The headline projections are models that depend on asset prices, spending and life spans that nobody can know in advance, which is why they have ranged from $41 trillion to $124 trillion and back down to $36 trillion for the same event. The household data are firmer: the median boomer household’s net worth, the share held by the top tenth, the gap in inheritances by race, and the finding that money first goes sideways to a surviving spouse are all measured rather than projected, and they describe a transfer that is large, uneven and slower than its name suggests. How any one family should prepare for its share is a matter of individual circumstances, and the estate, tax and beneficiary decisions involved are for qualified professionals to handle.