Every few years the rent-versus-buy debate gets a new set of calculators, and every few years the calculators reach the same shrug: it depends. On the monthly payment, it does. On what a household owns twenty years later, it does not, and the Federal Reserve has been measuring that for decades.
The figure
The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances is the most careful measurement of American household wealth that exists. Its 2022 edition, the most recent, puts the median net worth of a homeowning household at $396,200. The median renting household: $10,400. The typical homeowner is roughly 38 times wealthier than the typical renter.
| Median net worth, homeowners | $396,200 | |
|---|---|---|
| Median net worth, renters | $10,400 |
Federal Reserve Board, Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022.
Some of that gap is selection: people with more money are more likely to buy. But the Fed's own analysis finds the gap holds at every age, which means selection does not explain it. Something about owning produces wealth that renting does not.
Why the gap is structural
Three mechanisms, none of them exotic.
The first is amortization. Every mortgage payment moves a little money from the bank's side of the ledger to the owner's. It is saving that happens whether or not the household would have saved, which is why economists call it forced saving, and over a decade it is the largest single source of wealth for most families. Rent moves the same money and none of it comes back.
The second is leverage. A buyer who puts 10 percent down and sees the home appreciate 4 percent has earned 40 percent on the money committed. No other asset available to an ordinary household lets it control an appreciating asset with a fraction of the price, at a fixed cost, for thirty years. That last part is its own story.
The third is the fixed payment. A 30-year mortgage payment is the same in year twenty as in year one; rent is not. Over a long tenure the owner's housing cost falls in real terms while the renter's rises, and the difference compounds in the owner's favor every year.
The honest caveats
Owning is not free money. Transaction costs on both ends mean a home held less than about five years often loses to renting on paper. Maintenance is real and renters do not pay it. And the leverage that multiplies gains multiplies losses in a falling market, which is why the timing of a purchase within a life, not within a market cycle, is the question that matters.
The bigger caveat is that the door is narrowing. In the National Association of REALTORS' 2025 profile, first-time buyers were 21 percent of the market, the lowest share since the survey began in 1981, and the median first-time buyer was 40 years old, a record. The wealth gap in the Fed's data is partly a gap between people who got in and people who did not, and it is getting harder to get in.
What it means on the corridor
Central Indiana is one of the places where the door is still open. The July 2026 median sale price in Lafayette was $240,000, in Lebanon $285,000, in Indianapolis $265,000, against a national median of $434,100. A household that can rent here can, in most cases, own here, and the Fed's figures say the difference in outcome is not a matter of degree.
Sources: Federal Reserve Board, Survey of Consumer Finances 2022 and "Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2019 to 2022"; National Association of REALTORS, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers; Indiana Association of REALTORS Housing Hub, July 2026; National Association of REALTORS, existing-home median price, July 2026. All read at source, September 2026.