$300K at 30 is the top 28%. $300K at 50 is the bottom third. Where your net worth actually ranks

Ask someone whether $300,000 is a good net worth and the honest answer is "at what age?" At 30 it puts you in the top 28% of Canadian households. At 50 the identical number sits in the bottom third. Nothing about the money changed — the peer group did.

Below are the rankings for a handful of round numbers at four ages, computed from Statistics Canada's Survey of Financial Security. A few things to know before you read them:

• These are household figures, not individual — a couple counts once.
• They're national. A $750K net worth in Vancouver and in Moncton rank the same here, even though they buy very different lives.
• Net worth means everything you own minus everything you owe, home equity included. If you haven't worked out your own number yet, what actually counts as net worth walks through it.

At 30: the bar is low, and $300K clears it easily

The median household net worth in the 30-ish age band is about $159,000.

• $100,000 — 37th percentile. Below the middle, but ahead of more than a third of your peers, many of whom are still net-negative from student debt.
• $300,000 — 72nd percentile, top 28%. That usually means a home with some equity, or a very disciplined decade of saving.

At 40: the median more than doubles

By 40 the median jumps to about $409,000, mostly on the back of home equity. That lifts the bar for everyone.

• $100,000 — 22nd percentile. Behind roughly four in five households.
• $300,000 — 41st percentile. Just under the middle.
• $750,000 — 71st percentile, top 29%.

Notice that $300K went from "top 28%" at 30 to "below median" at 40. That's a ten-year swing of more than 30 percentile points on an unchanged balance.

At 50: $750K is exactly average

The median at 50 is about $676,000.

• $300,000 — 30th percentile.
• $750,000 — 53rd percentile. Essentially the middle of the pack.

At 60: the peak of the curve

Household net worth peaks in the 55-to-64 band, where the median is about $873,000. This is the age where paid-off homes and full RRSPs are most common, and it's the toughest peer group to rank well against.

• $300,000 — 27th percentile.
• $750,000 — 45th percentile. Just below median.

The curve is steep because home equity is doing most of the work. A renter with $300K in investments at 50 ranks in the bottom third — but has more liquid wealth than most of the homeowners ranked above them. Percentile tells you where you sit, not how flexible your position is.

What the ranking is good for

Two useful readings, and one bad one.

1. Are you roughly where your age group is? If you're within a decile or two of the median, you're on the normal path — and the normal path is a mortgage that gets paid down over 25 years.
2. Is the gap closing or opening? Check again in a year. A 25-year-old at the 40th percentile who is at the 55th by 35 is doing something right, even if the raw dollar figure still feels small.
3. Bad reading: "I'm behind, so I've failed." The median household at 60 didn't get to $873K through brilliance; it got there through 30 years of compulsory mortgage payments and a housing market that cooperated. If your number is lower and you rent, you're comparing apples to a paid-off house.

Run your own figure at your own age in the net worth by age tool. It returns a percentile and the median for your band, so you can see both the ranking and the distance.

Net worth percentiles delivered by Metrestick. Underlying data: Statistics Canada, Survey of Financial Security 2023, Table 11-10-0016-01 (median net worth by age band) with the percentile spread modelled from the national distribution in Table 11-10-0049-01 (Statistics Canada Open Licence). National household figures; not adjusted by province.