Am I rich in France, if you don't count the house?
Type what your household holds in savings and investments. Property and state pension entitlements stay out of it.
My household holds € in savings and investments.
Count bank and savings deposits, mutual funds, bonds, listed shares, voluntary pension plans and whole life insurance, and money owed to you. Leave out the home, other property, vehicles, business equity, and entitlements from state or workplace pension schemes.
Households in France you hold more than
50%
Above the middle
Past the €20,600 median. Worth remembering how low that bar sits: half of all holders are below it.
€20,600 is right at the €20,600 median for France. Half of the households that hold any financial assets sit below that line, and half above it.
The published ladder
Where savings and investments actually sit in France.
Among the 99.9% of households in France that hold any financial asset, the median total is €20,600 and the mean is €81,600. The gap between them is the story: a small number of large portfolios pull the average far above the middle. Across the euro area the median is €16,600.
Tenth percentile
€600
Lowest published threshold
A tenth of the households with any financial assets in France hold no more than this.
Median
€21K
Euro area: €17K
Half hold less than this. The mean is €82K, which is what a handful of large portfolios does to an average.
Ninetieth percentile
€176K
Highest published threshold
The top tenth in France starts here. The survey publishes nothing above it, so there is no top 1% number.
€20,600 places you above 50% of the households in France that hold any financial asset.
Against the euro area as a whole you would be above 53% rather than 50%.
Who owns what
Almost every household in France has a bank account. After that it thins out fast.
9.7% of households in France hold mutual funds and 12.6% own listed shares directly, against 14.2% and 11.4% across the euro area. Deposits are close to universal everywhere. Everything below them is a minority position, and that is what makes the medians in the next column so much larger than the median for the whole country.
Asset
Households owning
Median among owners
Vs euro area
Deposits
99.9%
€13,300Euro area: 99.1% own it
Mutual funds
9.7%
€13,600Euro area: 14.2% own it
Bonds
0.6%
€10,800Euro area: 3.5% own it
Listed shares
12.6%
€8,000Euro area: 11.4% own it
Money owed to the household
4.4%
€3,400Euro area: 6.6% own it
Voluntary pension and life insurance
41.8%
€16,500Euro area: 27.5% own it
Other financial assets
10.2%
€3,000Euro area: 11.2% own it
Ownership is compared with the euro-area rate on every row. Medians are among the households that own that asset, so a large median tells you nothing about how common the asset is.
Where the money sits
What financial wealth in France is actually made of.
40.4% of financial wealth in France sits in deposits, against 44.1% across the euro area, and 35.2% sits in voluntary pension plans and life insurance. The mix decides how much of it is invested at all, which over a decade matters more than the total.
Deposits40.4% · EA 44.1%
Mutual funds9.1% · EA 13.3%
Bonds0.4% · EA 3.0%
Listed shares8.7% · EA 9.7%
Money owed to the household0.6% · EA 1.8%
Voluntary pension and life insurance35.2% · EA 18.3%
Other financial assets5.6% · EA 9.8%
Shares of the total financial assets held by households in France. Where the survey published no figure, the item is left out rather than drawn as zero.
The other half
What happens when you put the house back in.
Financial assets are 21.7% of everything households in France own. The other 78.3% is real: property above all, plus vehicles, valuables and business equity. Across the euro area the financial share is 20.7%. This is the number behind the question in the title, and for most households it means the majority of their wealth cannot be spent without selling where they live.
Financial
21.7%
Everything on this page, as a share of total household assets in France.
Real
78.3%
Property, vehicles, valuables and business equity in France, none of which a monthly statement tracks.
Euro area, financial
20.7%
The euro-area financial share is 20.7%, against 21.7% in France.
Three numbers and an outlier
What these numbers look like from the outside.
Voluntary pensions as a share of financial wealth
35.2%, the highest of the 7 countries here
35.2% of financial wealth in France sits in voluntary pension plans and life insurance. Money in these is invested but locked, so a household can look well provided for and still have very little it can reach.
Households with any financial assets
99.9%
Every percentile on this page is measured among these households. The remaining 0.1% in France hold nothing at all, and the survey publishes no distribution for them.
Own listed shares directly
12.6%
Against 11.4% across the euro area. Another 9.7% of households in France hold mutual funds, which is the other way into the same markets.
Financial wealth held in deposits
40.4%
Against 44.1% across the euro area. Deposits are the safest place to keep money and the surest way to lose its purchasing power slowly.
40.4% of financial wealth in France sits in deposits, against 44.1% across the euro area. Deposits keep their number and lose purchasing power slowly; funds and shares are where the larger balances on this page come from. Capital at risk.
Being above the €20,600 median in this data is a lower bar than it sounds. The number that matters now is your own, tracked over time.
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Among the 99.9% of households in France that hold any financial asset, the median is €20,600 and the mean is €81,600, 4.0 times higher (ECB HFCS Wave 2023, Table C3). The mean is the wrong number to measure yourself against: a small number of large portfolios lifts it, while the median describes the household in the middle. The euro-area median is €16,600. It sits in the middle of the ten euro-area countries covered here, above Italy and Spain and below Germany and Belgium.
€176,100 (ECB HFCS Wave 2023, Table C3). That is the ninetieth percentile among households holding any financial asset, and it is the highest threshold the survey publishes: there is no top 5% or top 1% figure in these tables, so any such number quoted for this survey has been extrapolated by someone rather than measured. At the other end, a tenth of holders have €600 or less.
12.6% own listed shares directly and 9.7% hold mutual funds (Table C1), against 11.4% and 14.2% across the euro area. Deposits, by contrast, are held by 99.9% of households. The dividing line in this data is not who saves but who invests, and it falls in very different places from one country to the next.
€50,000 places a household above about 69% of the households in France that hold any financial asset. It is 2.4 times the median of €20,600, and still below the top-tenth threshold of €176,100. Both comparisons are worth holding at once: the multiple sounds large because the median is low, not because the amount is high.
40.4% of financial wealth in France sits in deposits, 9.1% in mutual funds, 8.7% in listed shares and 35.2% in voluntary pension plans and life insurance (Table D3). The euro-area split is 44.1% deposits and 18.3% pensions. The pension and life-insurance share of 35.2% is the highest of the seven countries here where that figure is comparable.
78.3% of everything households in France own is a real asset: property above all, plus vehicles, valuables and business equity. Only 21.7% is financial (Table D1), against 20.7% across the euro area. That is the answer to the question this page asks. Take the house out and most balance sheets shrink to a fraction of their headline size, which is why a net-worth figure and a savings figure feel like they describe two different households.
Deposits in current and savings accounts, mutual funds, bonds, listed shares held directly, money owed to the household by people outside it, voluntary pension plans and whole life insurance, and other financial assets such as managed accounts. It excludes the main residence and any other property, vehicles, valuables and business equity, and it excludes entitlements from state and workplace pension schemes, which for a typical employee are worth more than everything on this list combined.
Among the households that hold them, the median mutual-fund holding in France is €13,600, the median direct shareholding is €8,000 and the median voluntary pension or life insurance is €16,500 (Table C2). These are medians among owners, not among all households, so a large figure here says nothing about how common the asset is: 9.7% hold funds and 12.6% hold shares.
Three reasons, all visible in the same tables. The distribution is already conditional on holding something, so it excludes the 0.1% of households in France with no financial asset at all. 40.4% of what is held sits in deposits rather than in assets that grow. And financial assets are 21.7% of household wealth here, against 20.7% across the euro area. 57.2% of French households own their main residence, and property carries most of the balance sheet.
41.8% of French households hold a voluntary pension plan or whole life insurance, against 27.5% across the euro area, and the median holding among them is €16,500 (ECB HFCS Wave 2023, Tables C1 and C2). Together those plans hold 35.2% of all French financial wealth, the highest share of the seven countries here where the figure is comparable (Table D3). The practical consequence is that a large part of French savings is invested but not reachable: it looks like wealth on a survey form and behaves like a locked account in a crisis.
