For decades, the markers of extreme wealth were easy to spot: the second home, the fancy cars, the Ivy League education. New analysis of Federal Reserve data points to a subtler one: a third child.
Mike Konczal, vice president of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and a former White House economist, studied households headed by 45- to 64-year-olds in his analysis of the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, pooling five surveys from 2013 through 2025. He found that 49% of top-1% earners have three or more children, compared with about 40% of the rest of the top 10%.
Families with four or more kids are about as common in both groups, so the gap comes down to the third child: 34% of the 1% stop at exactly three, versus 24% of the merely affluent.
What changed isn’t the rich. Since the 1990s, families with three or more kids have become less common overall and among the rest of the top 10%, while the 1%’s share barely moved. “What’s new is that it has become rarer for everyone else,” Konczal writes.
Big families thin out in the upper middle class. Rank families by wealth instead of income, and among those wealthier than about three-quarters of Americans their age, but well short of the top, only about a third have three or more kids.
That’s well below families further down the wealth ladder. In the top 1%, half do.
Many of these families earn too much for federal child care subsidies, which are capped at 85% of a state’s median income, but not enough to hire their way around the problem.
Elaine Shi and her husband once thought they might have four kids. They stopped at three. Asked how much cost factored in, Shi, the CEO and co-founder of body-composition scanning company BodySpec, said simply: “None.” What settled it was their third child’s “firecracker personality,” along with her health during each pregnancy.
Shi doesn’t see that divide among the people she knows. “Candidly, this has not been my experience,” she says. What stands out to her is timing: “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 say they want three
Big families used to be ordinary. In 1976, about two-thirds of mothers in their early 40s had three or more kids; by 2016, 38% did, according to Pew Research Center.
The U.S. fertility rate, close to two children per woman in 1995, hit a record low of 1.57 in 2025, by a Wall Street Journal calculation using federal data.
Americans still say they want more: 42% called three or more kids ideal in Gallup’s July 2025 poll. But more than 7 in 10 say that raising kids is unaffordable for most people, according to BYU’s 2025 American Family Survey.
Where the money goes
Shi’s third child arrived at a hectic moment. Her older two, about two years apart, were starting school, and their needs were diverging.
“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 says. She was also mid-fundraise and needed to get back to work fast. “So we ended up investing in multiple caregivers to better meet everyone’s needs.”
The biggest financial change from two kids to three, she says, was “definitely childcare.”
Most families can’t hire their way out. Full-day care for a child cost $6,552 to $15,600 a year in 2022, or 8.9% to 16% of median family income, according to the Labor Department. And that’s for one child.
By one LendingTree estimate, a two-child household needs to earn $400,000 a year for childcare to be affordable.
A third kid often means a bigger house, too. The typical existing single-family home sold for $412,500 in 2024, about five times the median household income, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. In the 1990s, it was closer to three times.
Why it matters beyond the family budget
The U.S. recorded just over half a million more births than deaths in 2025, and Census Bureau and Congressional Budget Office projections show that cushion ending in the next decade, the Wall Street Journal reported. After that, population growth would depend on immigration.
Economists warn that fewer births mean a smaller future workforce, slower growth and more strain on Social Security.
Konczal cautions that his numbers show a correlation, but it’s the one you’d expect if money solves the hard parts of raising kids. He argues that some of what money buys the rich, like stability and support, could be offered to families now, through policy aimed at the years when kids are young and budgets are tightest.
Shi’s own fix is more about time than money. She and her husband run BodySpec together, and their favorite workday, she says, is Saturday.
The office is empty, and one of the kids usually tags along, most often her son, the middle child. He gets to build a LEGO set without his sisters taking it apart, then has lunch alone with his mom.
“Nobody told us this counted as work-life balance, but it’s the closest thing we’ve found,” Shi says.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com