The Power of Mass ECHOS: Facing the Numbers So We Can Change Them
By Lee Pelton, President and CEO, The Boston Foundation August 12, 2026
Today, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published Family Wealth in Massachusetts, drawn from the 2025 Massachusetts Economic Conditions and Household Opportunity Survey, known as Mass ECHOS. It gives us something unprecedented: an honest, region-specific accounting of where Massachusetts families stand today, and a shared foundation of evidence for building something more equitable tomorrow.
James Baldwin's insight that “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced,’ has stayed with me these past five years, ever since we began pushing to launch a study that would finally give our region vital data it had never had on the economic well-being of Massachusetts residents.
Today, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published Family Wealth in Massachusetts, drawn from the 2025 Massachusetts Economic Conditions and Household Opportunity Survey, known as Mass ECHOS. The Boston Foundation helped fund, steer and launch this independent study with the Eastern Bank Foundation, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and the Barr Foundation, with about 5,000 Massachusetts households sharing detailed information about their wealth, not just their income.
The numbers are sobering, but not surprising to anyone who has spent time in this work. Overall median family wealth in Massachusetts is roughly $374,000, yet one in six families here have zero or negative wealth. White families reported median net wealth of $549,200. Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander families reported $305,000. For Black families, median wealth was $7,800. For Hispanic families, it was just $1,200. More than a third of households statewide, and fully half of respondents in the Commonwealth’s 26 Gateway Cities, said they could not cover a $400 emergency expense without borrowing or going without.
The survey also highlights, with Massachusetts-specific data, the impact of education and homeownership on long-term wealth and savings. Families without a high school diploma had median wealth of just $1,100, compared to $947,400 for those with graduate degrees. Homeowners statewide reported median wealth of $790,500, compared with $1,500 for renters. That a wealth gap exists between homeowners and renters is not a surprise, but the five hundred-fold difference sends an unmistakable message. It is the clearest evidence we have that owning a home remains a singularly powerful gateway to intergenerational wealth in this Commonwealth, and indeed in this country.
That gap in the data, the absence, until now, of reliable, granular numbers on wealth by race, education, and geography, was itself a kind of harm. Without it, our policies default to guesswork, and guesswork tends to preserve the status quo. Mass ECHOS builds on the knowledge we gained from the Boston Fed's landmark 2015 Color of Wealth study. While the two studies use different data methods and geographies and cannot be compared directly, they draw us to a singular conclusion. The broad wealth gaps built up over centuries have not meaningfully narrowed in the past decade.
Those disparities were not created by accident, and they will not be dismantled by accident either. They require perseverance and collaboration among partners, donors, researchers, financial institutions, nonprofits, and civic leaders, committed to making philanthropy an effective vehicle for social change, and to repairing harm that history left behind.
"It is the clearest evidence we have that owning a home remains a singularly powerful gateway to intergenerational wealth in this Commonwealth, and indeed in this country."
I share all of this at a personal inflection point. I came to the Boston Foundation because I believed this institution could help translate moral urgency into civic action, and I continue to believe that deeply. That belief is why, in 2022, I created the Greater Boston Partnership to Close the Racial Wealth Gap, a coalition based at TBF that brings together housing, financial, nonprofit, philanthropic, and civic leaders around one data-driven mission: to close the racial wealth gap by increasing homeownership in communities of color. The coalition is closing in on its initial $25 million fundraising goal, funds estimated to create $170 million in home equity for more than 700 first-time homebuyers over the next decade. Its initial investment, the Massachusetts Housing Partnership's ONE+ down payment assistance program, has already supported purchases by nearly 400 first-time homebuyers in its first 18 months. MassECHOS now gives that work a depth of evidence we never had before.
But as others in this work have rightly noted, no single sector or group––not philanthropy, not local communities, not policymakers––can close these gaps alone. The role of this report is not to provide solutions. It's to inform and spark the conversations, and the sustained, cross-sector work, that leads to them.
This is, in the end, what the Boston Foundation exists to do: improve lives and strengthen the communities we serve not only through philanthropic giving, but also by collecting data, commissioning research, and fueling the ideas that inform public policy. Our work is not only about advocating for change. It is about advocating for repair. Mass ECHOS gives us something unprecedented: an honest, region-specific accounting of where Massachusetts families stand today, and a shared foundation of evidence for building something more equitable tomorrow. It has taken time and patience to compile, and I am grateful to our partners and to the TBF colleagues who carried this work forward, and who will carry it forward after I leave the foundation.
Facing these numbers is hard. But now that we have faced them, we can begin, together, to change them.
Lee Pelton
President and CEO
Key Findings
Overall, MA families have a median household wealth of roughly $374,000, but one-in-six families in the state have zero or negative wealth. White families reported median net wealth of $549,200. Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander families reported $305,000. For Black families, median wealth was $7,800. For Hispanic families, it was just $1,200.
More than a third of households statewide, and fully half of respondents in the Commonwealth’s 26 Gateway Cities, said they could not cover a $400 emergency expense without borrowing or going without.
Families without a high school diploma had median wealth of just $1,100, compared to $947,400 for those with graduate degrees.
Homeowners statewide reported median wealth of $790,500, compared with $1,500 for renters.
"Mass ECHOS gives us something unprecedented: an honest, region-specific accounting of where Massachusetts families stand today, and a shared foundation of evidence for building something more equitable tomorrow."
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston published Family Wealth in Massachusetts, drawn from the 2025 Massachusetts Economic Conditions and Household Opportunity Survey, known as Mass ECHOS. The Boston Foundation helped fund, steer and launch this independent study with the Eastern Bank Foundation, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, and the Barr Foundation, with about 5,000 Massachusetts households sharing detailed information about their wealth, not just their income.