For decades, researchers have repeated a simple fact about income and family size: The higher the family income, the fewer children you have.
But in recent years, that trend has started to reverse; wealthier families are beginning to have more children than middle-class families. And a new analysis suggests that, in the United States, having a third child might be more than a sign of being wealthy.
It could be a sign of the 1 percent.
In an analysis of the Federal Reserve’s recent Survey of Consumer Finances, Mike Konczal, vice president of policy and research at the left-leaning nonprofit Economic Security Project, found that 49 percent of U.S. families in the top 1 percent of incomes had three or more children, compared with 40 to 43 percent for most other income groups.
The same pattern held for the top 1 percent of earners by net worth; 50 percent of Americans in that group had three or more children.
Having children “is just a huge concentrated expense,” Konczal said in an interview. While many working professionals can scrape together funds to have two children, he noted, a third can require working professionals to pay for child care for seven or eight years in a row. “A third kid is a much harder accounting problem,” he added.
Some have critiqued the analysis. Lyman Stone, senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a right-leaning think tank that studies family life in America, says that there are potential flaws in looking at the survey data. It could be capturing the fact that richer men are more likely to remarry, he argues, reflecting more stepchildren than biological children.
But, he said, richer people do tend to have more children, and the bigger issue is that some people are not having as large a family as they want. “It’s a policy problem; it’s a big problem,” he said.
Konczal agrees that stepchildren and remarriages could complicate the analysis. But, he said, he doesn’t think that’s the whole story. Peer-reviewed research has also found that, in developed countries, higher incomes increasingly mean more children. In one 2018 study from economists at San Francisco State University and Tel Aviv University, researchers found that in 1980, the relationship between income and number of children in the United States was linear: Richer women had fewer children. But in 2010, the trend was more “U-shaped” — both poorer women and richer women were more likely to have three children, while the middle class was more likely to have closer to two.
In that paper, the researchers hypothesized that the effect was due to the growing gap between rich and poor. Highly educated and wealthy families, they argued, could have two parents working and use their combined income to pay for outside help and child care; middle-class families with two working parents, on the other hand, might struggle to pay for child care even for one or two children. (The study focused on White women, to avoid confounding from changing demographics.)
Meanwhile, many Americans say that they want to have more than two children. According to a Gallup poll from 2025, 42 percent of Americans say their ideal number of children is three or more — and that number has stayed relatively stable since the late 1990s. Forty percent of Americans say their ideal is two children, and just 6 percent say zero or one.
Overall, Americans want an average of 2.7 children; they actually end up having an average of 1.6.
“What we’re seeing far too often in the United States is that parents or couples are not having the number of children that they want — not due to an inability to conceive, but due to the fact that they can’t afford it,” said Elliot Haspel, senior fellow at Capita, a think tank that focuses on family policy.
One reason is the cost of child care. The annual average cost of child care in the United States is now $13,184 per child, up from $10,681 in 2021, according to the group Child Care Aware of America. (The median household income is about $87,000, meaning that two children in day care could easily gobble up about 30 percent of a household’s gross income.) In dense urban areas, the cost can climb even more, to well above $20,000 per year.
Then there is the cost of housing. As all potential buyers know, the cost of purchasing a home has risen more quickly than wages over the past several decades — making it harder for young, middle-class parents to buy homes that are big enough for larger families.
Haspel put it simply. “You don’t want children to be a luxury good,” he said.
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