Having a third child is emerging as an understated marker of extreme wealth in the United States, with nearly half of top-1% earners aged 45 to 64 raising three or more children.
The finding comes from Mike Konczal, vice-president of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and a former White House economist, who analysed five rounds of the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances from 2013 to 2025.
His analysis found that 49% of households in the top 1% of earners had at least three children, compared with about 40% among the rest of the top 10%.
The difference is concentrated among families with exactly three children. Some 34% of top-1% households stopped at three, against 24% of those who were affluent but outside the top 1%. Families with four or more children were similarly common in both groups.
The pattern has less to do with the richest families having more children than in the past than with larger families becoming less common elsewhere. Since the 1990s, the share of families with three or more children has fallen among the general population and the rest of the top 10%, while remaining broadly stable among the top 1%.
“What’s new is that it has become rarer for everyone else,” Konczal wrote.
Why a third child is harder to afford
The divide is also visible when households are ranked by wealth rather than income. Among families wealthier than roughly three-quarters of people their age, but well below the top, only about a third have three or more children. In the top 1%, the proportion is about half.
Many upper-middle-class families earn too much to qualify for federal childcare subsidies, which are capped at 85% of a state’s median income, but not enough to employ a network of paid carers.
Full-day childcare cost between 6,552 and 15,600 dollars per child in 2022, equivalent to between 8.9% and 16% of median family income, according to the US Labor Department. A LendingTree estimate suggests that a household with two children needs an annual income of 400,000 dollars for childcare to be affordable.
A third child can also bring the cost of a larger home. The typical existing single-family property sold for 412,500 dollars in 2024, about five times median household income, compared with closer to three times income in the 1990s.
Elaine Shi, chief executive and co-founder of body-composition scanning company BodySpec, said she and her husband had once imagined having four children but stopped at three.
She said cost played no part in the decision. Instead, the couple were influenced by their third child’s “firecracker personality” and by Shi’s health during her pregnancies.
Shi said she had not noticed a clear divide between wealthy families and others among her own acquaintances. “Candidly, this has not been my experience,” she said.
She believed the timing of parenthood was more significant, saying: “Relatively few of my peers in our late 30s have chosen to have three children because they started having the first one relatively late in life.”
Americans still want larger families
Three-child families were once far more widespread. In 1976, about two-thirds of mothers in their early 40s had three or more children; by 2016, that figure had fallen to 38%, according to the Pew Research Center.
The US fertility rate was close to two children per woman in 1995 but fell to a record low of 1.57 in 2025. Yet 42% of Americans said three or more children was the ideal number in a Gallup poll conducted in July 2025.
More than seven in ten people also said raising children was unaffordable for most families, according to the 2025 American Family Survey conducted by Brigham Young University.
Shi said the arrival of her third child coincided with a demanding period, as her older children were starting school and developing different schedules and interests. The family decided to pay for several caregivers so that the children could attend activities while she returned to work during a fundraising drive.
“It didn’t seem fair to drag an infant along to every gymnastics and swim class, nor did it seem fair to forego those kinds of activities to stick to a baby’s nap schedule,” she said.
She described childcare as “definitely” the biggest financial change between having two children and having three.
Falling birth rates raise wider concerns
The trend has implications beyond household finances. The US recorded just over half a million more births than deaths in 2025, but projections from the Census Bureau and Congressional Budget Office indicate that this margin will disappear within the next decade.
After that, population growth would depend on immigration, while economists have warned that fewer births could mean a smaller future workforce, slower economic growth and greater pressure on Social Security.
Konczal has cautioned that his findings show a correlation rather than proving that wealth causes larger families. He argues, however, that the figures are consistent with the idea that money can remove some of the practical difficulties of raising children, and that similar stability and support could be made available through policies aimed at the years when children are young and family budgets are under greatest strain.
For Shi, the solution is not solely financial. She and her husband run BodySpec together, and on Saturdays one of their children often goes into the otherwise empty office.
Her son, usually the one who joins her, can build a Lego set without his sisters dismantling it before having lunch alone with his mother.
“Nobody told us this counted as work-life balance, but it’s the closest thing we’ve found,” Shi said.
