Asked to name their most important values, 49% of Americans put family in their top picks — more than freedom (30%), health (27%), integrity (27%), and faith (26%) combined into any single one of those categories, according to Gallup’s American Values Survey. Wealth barely registered at 7%. Family isn’t just winning; it’s not close.
But break the same data down by age, and the picture gets more complicated. 58% of adults 65 and older rank family as a top value, compared with 44% of adults under 30 — a 14-point gap that says something real about how differently generations weigh the people in their lives against everything else competing for priority.
A Landslide, Not a Close Race
Gallup’s survey, conducted April 2-15, 2025 among 2,026 U.S. adults, asked people to select their most important values from a list of 23 options. Family topped every other value by a wide margin — the next closest, freedom, trailed by 19 points. Health and integrity tied for third at 27%. Faith came in at 26%. Further down the list, values often associated with ambition or achievement barely registered: wealth at 7%, achievement at just 2%.
That ranking lands with extra weight heading into Labor Day weekend, when family gatherings are as close to a national ritual as the U.S. has. The data suggests the instinct pulling people back to a parent’s house or a sibling’s backyard this weekend isn’t a minority sentiment dressed up as tradition — it’s the single most widely shared value in the country, according to Americans’ own accounting of what matters to them.
Where the Generations Split
The 58%-to-44% gap between the oldest and youngest adults surveyed doesn’t mean young adults don’t value family — 44% still ranking it a top priority puts family well ahead of most other options even within that age group. But it does mean family’s grip as the dominant, consensus value is looser at the younger end of the spectrum than the topline 49% figure suggests.
Part of that is straightforward life stage. Adults 65 and older are more likely to already have adult children, grandchildren, and a lifetime of family relationships built up — the value has had decades to compound. Adults under 30 are more likely to still be building their own households, careers, and friend networks, with family relationships that may feel more like a work in progress than a settled center of gravity. A value that’s lived with for six decades reads differently than one still being formed.
What Filled the Gap for Younger Adults
The 14-point difference has to go somewhere else in the rankings, and the shape of Gallup’s full list offers a clue. Values like happiness (17%), respect (17%), and knowledge (12%) sit in the tier just below the top cluster — plausible landing spots for younger respondents distributing their choices across a broader set of priorities rather than consolidating around family the way older adults do. Younger adults aren’t necessarily rejecting family. They may simply be less consolidated around any single value at a stage of life when identity and priorities are still actively forming.
Faith and Wealth Tell a Related Story
Family’s dominance over faith (26%) and wealth (7%) is worth sitting with too, since both have historically been framed as competing anchors for a meaningful life — faith as a source of purpose, wealth as a marker of security and success. Neither comes close to touching family in this data. That’s a useful corrective for anyone who assumes Americans are more divided by religion or more driven by money than they are by the pull toward the people they’re related to. On this particular question, the data says otherwise by a wide margin.
It also complicates a common assumption about younger generations specifically — that they’re more individualistic, more career-focused, more likely to prioritize personal achievement over family ties. Achievement scored a mere 2% across the full sample. Whatever is pulling younger adults away from family as their single dominant value, it isn’t a wholesale swap toward ambition or wealth. The 14-point generational gap seems to be about family’s relative weight against other relational and personal values, not a rejection of family in favor of status or money.
The Headline Number Undersells the Nuance
It would be easy to read “family beats everything” and stop there, and the topline number supports that read. But a value that commands 58% consensus among people who’ve had a lifetime to settle into it, and 44% among people still figuring out their own lives, isn’t a monolith — it’s a value in the process of being tested and re-earned by each new generation on its own terms.
That’s arguably the more useful finding for anyone gathering with relatives this weekend. Family isn’t losing its place at the top of what Americans say matters most. But the certainty behind that ranking is generational, not universal — which means the family dinner table might be holding more quietly different definitions of “what matters most” than the numbers at a glance let on.
