Just 17% of U.S. children under 18 now live in a blended family, down from 23% in 2013, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau survey data released in April. But the households that remain blended carry roughly half the wealth of households that aren’t: a median net worth of $86,300, compared with $194,400 for children in non-blended families.
The gap shows up across nearly every financial measure Pew examined. Fifty-five percent of blended families own their home, versus 66% of non-blended families, and among those who do own, blended-family home equity sits at a median of $132,000, well below the $195,000 median for non-blended homeowners.
- 17% of children live in a blended family, down from 23% in 2013
- Blended-family median net worth is $86,300, versus $194,400 for other households
- Homeownership is 55% among blended families versus 66% among non-blended families
- Rates vary sharply by race: 28% of Black children live in blended families, versus 19% of Hispanic children, 15% of white children, and 7% of Asian children
- Children of parents with a bachelor’s degree or higher are far less likely to be in a blended family, at just 9%, versus 28% for parents with a high school diploma or less
Pew’s data, drawn from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, also breaks the trend down by education, a gap Pew’s researchers linked to broader patterns in who divorces and who has children outside of marriage.
Household structure within the “blended family” label varies too. Just under half of these children live with one biological parent and that parent’s new partner, split roughly between mother-plus-partner (33%) and father-plus-partner (13%) arrangements, while half live with at least one half-sibling, according to Pew. Younger children are less likely to be in this situation than older ones: 13% of kids five and under live in a blended family, compared with 22% of teenagers.
Child support plays a real but partial role in the financial picture. Among blended families with a non-custodial parent, 46% have a formal child support agreement, and 64% of those actually receive payments, at a median of $400 a month, or about 12% of household income, Pew found.
Part of what makes the wealth gap notable is how consistent it is across nearly every measure Pew examined, rather than being driven by a single outlier factor. Income alone doesn’t close the gap: even accounting for household earnings, blended families report lower savings, lower retirement account balances, and less accumulated equity in major assets than non-blended families with comparable income levels, according to the same Census-derived data. That pattern suggests the wealth difference reflects years of compounded financial disruption — the costs associated with a prior divorce or separation, legal fees, splitting assets, and rebuilding a household — rather than simply a snapshot of current earning power.
The decline in the overall share of blended families since 2013 is itself worth sitting with. It runs counter to a common assumption that remarriage and stepfamilies are becoming more common as divorce and repartnering rates shift. Instead, Pew’s data suggests the opposite: as overall marriage rates fall and more adults either stay single longer or never remarry after a split, the share of children growing up with a stepparent has actually contracted, even as the financial pressures facing the blended families that remain have stayed just as pronounced.
That combination — a shrinking category carrying a persistent wealth gap — suggests the families still forming blended households today may look different from those a decade ago, potentially reflecting a somewhat different mix of circumstances behind the repartnering than in years when it was more common across a broader cross-section of parents, though Pew’s data doesn’t isolate exactly which factors are driving that shift, leaving that question for future research to untangle. What the numbers do make clear is that the story of the American blended family isn’t one of simple growth or simple decline — it’s a smaller group carrying a bigger financial burden than the data alone fully explains.
The net effect, per Pew’s analysis, is a shrinking but financially strained slice of American families: fewer kids are growing up with stepparents and half-siblings than a decade ago, but the ones who are face a wealth gap wide enough that it isn’t easily explained by income alone.
