Did median wealth in the U.S. fall nearly 20% from 2020-2025?

See The U.S. Added 1,200 New Millionaires a Day Last Year by Miriam Gottfried of The WSJ. Excerpt:

"While average wealth per U.S. adult climbed by almost 10% between 2020 and 2025 net of inflation, median wealth fell by nearly 20%."

This was based on a report from UBS, A Swiss multinational investment bank and financial services firm (according to Wikipedia). 

But I am skeptical. I looked at some data from the Federal Reserve on the wealth of the bottom 50% over these years and even if we adjust for population growth and inflation, it is clear that per person wealth of the bottom 50% has gone up over these years (and it is possible that the numbers at the Fed site are adjusted for inflation but it just does not say).

The Fed site is Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989. (Hat Tip to Timothy Taylor for this link-his blog is The Conversable Economist).

This graph shows that wealth for the bottom 50% in the U.S. about doubled from $2 trillion in 2020 to $4 trillion in 2026

 

It might be hard to see but it does say "Bottom 50%." You can got to the link and select bottom 50% to see for yourself. They also have an option to see a table with these numbers. This link will take you directly to the table.

In the 2nd quarter of 2020, the bottom 50% had $2.21 trillion in wealth. In the 2nd quarter of 2025 it was $4.13 trillion. So it was up 87%. The U.S. was up just 3.3%. See US Population by Year.

So if the total is up 87% and the number of persons is up just 3.3%, the wealth per person must be way up. And this is for the bottom 50%. Median means that half are below a certain number and half are above. The article says the median wealth went down. But that seems unlikely if the per person wealth of the bottom 50% is up.

If we adjust for inflation (and the numbers might have already been adjusted, I just can't tell), let's use the CPI increase of 24% from 2020-25. See Consumer Price Index Data from 1913 to 2026. I got the % increase by using the yearly average for each year.

So let's reduce the $4.13 trillion wealth owned by the bottom 50% in the 2nd quarter of 2025 by 24%. That gets us about $3.14 trillion. That is 42% higher than the $2.21 trillion in the 2nd quarter of 2020. Which is still much higher than the 3.3% increase in the U.S. population. That means per capita wealth increased for the bottom 50%. That makes me skeptical that the median wealth went down.