Stats › Active, passive and flows › Equity ownership
Who holds US corporate equities
Somebody owns every share that exists. The Federal Reserve keeps a running count of who, sorting the whole of US corporate equity into buckets: households, foreign investors, mutual funds, ETFs, pension funds, insurers, and so on. At the end of the first quarter of 2026 that pile was worth $106.9 trillion.
This page is that breakdown, plus the trend over the last few years, plus the two caveats you need before you quote any of it. The first is that the household line, 42.1% of everything, is a residual. The Federal Reserve measures what the institutions hold and assigns whatever's left over to households. It is a balancing item, not a survey, so it is not the same thing as retail investors. The second is that the public record of institutional holdings, Form 13F, has a filing threshold that hasn't moved since the 1970s and a 45 day reporting lag.
I built it because ownership figures get quoted a lot in arguments about who moves markets, and almost every quote I see is using the household line as if it meant something it doesn't. Getting that one distinction right is most of the value here. All the levels come from the Federal Reserve's own table, with the release date on it below. The percentage shares are my own arithmetic on their published numbers, and I've said so in the notes rather than dressing them up as official figures. Do the division yourself if you want to check.
US corporate equities were worth $106.9 trillion at the end of the first quarter of 2026 on the Federal Reserve's measure. The household sector holds 42.1%, the rest of the world 18.2%, mutual funds 15.4% and exchange traded funds 10.1%. Adding every fund, pension, insurer, bank and broker together gives institutions 36.0%. Two things deserve care. Foreign ownership has risen from 17.2% in 2023 and ETFs from 8.2%, both steadily. And the household line is a residual, which means it is not the same thing as retail investors.
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