Owning a home, raising a family, and retiring comfortably now carries a lifetime price tag of about $5.3 million—and Americans’ paychecks are falling further behind.
That’s according to Investopedia’s annual analysis of what it costs to reach eight classic life milestones: owning a home, buying new cars, raising two children and sending them to college, retiring, paying for healthcare, having a wedding, owning pets, and taking a yearly vacation. The total rose 4.1% from last year, to roughly $5.32 million from $5.11 million. As recently as 2023, the same basket of milestones cost about $3.4 million. Fortune reported last year that you needed at least $5 million—and a college degree—to reach the American Dream, up from the multimillion-dollar figure tallied in 2024.
What’s in the $5.3 million price tag
Homeownership remains the biggest line item. The lifetime cost of owning and maintaining a home rose 7.7% to about $1.28 million, up more than $91,000 in a single year.
The fastest-growing category was raising two children and putting them through college. That cost climbed nearly 9%, to about $954,000 from $876,000, driven by pricier childcare and in-state tuition. Replacing two new cars every five years adds roughly $1.21 million over a lifetime, and retirement costs about the same.
Healthcare was the only category to get cheaper, slipping to $413,000 from $414,000. Smaller milestones add up too: about $38,800 for a wedding, roughly $40,800 to care for a cat and a dog, and nearly $187,000 for a lifetime of annual vacations.
Paychecks aren’t keeping up
While the cost of the dream rose 4.1%, private-sector wages and salaries grew just 3.1% over the same period, according to Investopedia’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Investopedia estimates that a full-time worker with a bachelor’s degree earns about $3.6 million between ages 25 and 64, before income taxes. Adding 20 years of the average Social Security benefit, about $2,071 a month, brings lifetime income to roughly $4.1 million. That leaves the worker about $1.2 million short. And that scenario assumes a college degree, which many Americans don’t have.
The squeeze shows up across the income ladder. Even most six-figure earners say buying a house feels unattainable. Meanwhile, 8 in 10 Gen Z and millennial workers report holding two jobs to make ends meet.
Homeownership splits along income lines
Housing is the largest expense for most families, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2024 report on the economic well-being of U.S. households. That makes housing decisions a major factor in a family’s financial outcomes.
In 2024, 63% of adults owned their homes and 28% rented, but ownership varied sharply by income. Just 35% of adults earning less than $50,000 owned a home, compared with 85% of those with family income of $100,000 or more.
The gap was even wider for adults under 60. In that group, the homeownership rate among those earning over $100,000 was more than three times that of those earning under $50,000. The Fed offered two possible explanations. Older adults often bought their homes during their working years and now depend less on income to keep them. Home prices have also outpaced income growth, making it harder for younger, lower-income adults to buy than for earlier generations.
Most renters said money was the reason they rent. Sixty-eight percent said they can’t afford a down payment, 49% said they can’t afford a monthly mortgage payment, and 42% said they can’t qualify for a mortgage. It’s one reason Gen Z is rewriting the American Dream to skip the mortgage. Even so, Warren Buffett’s successor at Berkshire Hathaway is betting big on U.S. housing.
Renters are stretched to a record
Renting offers little relief. The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ America’s Rental Housing 2026 report found that a record 22.7 million renter households were cost-burdened in 2024, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities. That’s nearly half of all U.S. renters. About 12.1 million of those households were severely burdened, paying more than half their income for housing.
Rent growth has cooled since its pandemic-era spike, hovering near zero from mid-2023 through 2025, and rents on new leases are now edging down. But affordability hasn’t recovered, because rents have outpaced renters’ incomes for two decades. Households earning under $30,000 had a record-low $210 a month left over after paying for housing.
Americans are losing faith
Most Americans still believe they’ll achieve the American Dream, but that confidence is slipping. A Gallup poll released in June found 69% of U.S. adults expect to personally achieve it, down from 2024. As the country approaches its 250th birthday, roughly half of Americans say the American Dream no longer holds true, and younger generations are on track to earn less than their parents.
Business leaders have noticed. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has warned that the American Dream is slipping away. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said that reaching it now takes “luck[ing] out in some big way.”
Whether the dream is still within reach depends heavily on where you live and what you earn. According to the Fed, the median monthly mortgage payment was about $1,811 in the West, compared with $1,300 in the Midwest.