Retail Investor Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Sarah Davis, Digital Finance & Fintech | Last updated: September 6, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
American stock ownership fell to 58% of adults in April 2026, the lowest Gallup reading since 2022 and a four-point drop in twelve months. Over the same window, FINRA member firms reported a record $1,502,072 million of customer margin debt. Fewer households own equities, and the ones that do are borrowing more against them.
Quick Answer
According to Axis Intelligence Research, 58% of US adults reported owning stock in April 2026, down from 62% in 2025, while household directly and indirectly held corporate equities stood at $64.80 trillion at the end of the first quarter of 2026. Retail borrowing against those holdings reached 188.41 basis points of equity wealth in the same quarter, the highest reading in our published series.
Key Findings
- According to Gallup’s Economy and Personal Finance survey fielded April 1 to 15, 2026, 58% of US adults reported having money invested in the stock market, down from 62% in April 2025.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, the Retail Leverage Intensity Ratio reached 188.41 basis points on March 31, 2026, up from 172.96 basis points on September 30, 2025.
- According to FINRA Rule 4521 filings, debit balances in customers’ securities margin accounts peaked at $1,502,072 million in June 2026 and fell to $1,417,225 million in July 2026.
- According to the Investment Company Institute, US exchange-traded fund assets reached $15.67 trillion across 5,182 funds in July 2026, with 1,109 more ETFs listed than twelve months earlier.
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, Robinhood’s $368.7 billion of total platform assets on June 30, 2026 equalled 0.57% of US household equity holdings, which is the scale of the app-native retail channel measured against the whole.
How Many Americans Own Stock in 2026?
Gallup has asked the same question since 1998: does the respondent have money in the market, counting individual shares, stock mutual funds, and self-directed retirement accounts. The April 2026 reading was 58%, with 40% saying no and 2% offering no opinion. That is a four-point fall from 62% in both 2024 and 2025, and it puts participation back at its 2022 level.
The direction matters more than the level. Ownership climbed from a post-crisis low of 52% in 2013 and 2016 to 61% in 2023, then held at 62% for two years. The 2026 print is the first break in that recovery, and it lands in a year when equity valuations were not the constraint.
US Stock Ownership Rate by Year
| Survey year | Own stock (%) | Do not own (%) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 (Apr 1-15) | 58 | 40 | Gallup |
| 2025 (Apr 1-14) | 62 | 37 | Gallup |
| 2024 (Apr 1-22) | 62 | 37 | Gallup |
| 2023 (Apr 3-25) | 61 | 38 | Gallup |
| 2022 (Apr 1-19) | 58 | 41 | Gallup |
| 2016 (Apr 6-10) | 52 | 46 | Gallup |
Source: Gallup, Stock Market historical trends, retrieved September 6, 2026.
Sentiment moved with it. Asked in April 2026 whether investing $1,000 in the stock market would be a good idea, 43% said good and 53% said bad. Among non-retirees, 19% expected individual stocks to be a major source of retirement income, down from 24% a year earlier. And when Gallup asked which asset is the best long-term investment, stocks and mutual funds took 20%, behind real estate at 38% and only two points ahead of gold at 18%.
Sarah Davis, Digital Finance & Fintech: A four-point drop in a telephone survey with a ±4-point error band on combined samples is not, on its own, a trend. What makes it worth reading is that it moves in the same direction as the retirement-reliance question and the best-investment question in the same instrument, in the same field period. Three independent readings drifting the same way is a signal even when each one alone is inside the noise. The interesting part is what did not happen: equity wealth did not shrink. Participation did.
How Much Do US Households Actually Hold in Equities?
The Federal Reserve measures the pile itself rather than the headcount. In the Financial Accounts of the United States, households and nonprofit organizations held $64,799,689 million of directly and indirectly held corporate equities at the end of the first quarter of 2026, which was 45.76% of their total financial assets.
Household Equity Holdings by Quarter
| Quarter end | Directly and indirectly held corporate equities ($ millions) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-03-31 | 55,920,806 | Federal Reserve Z.1 |
| 2025-06-30 | 60,695,232 | Federal Reserve Z.1 |
| 2025-09-30 | 65,130,953 | Federal Reserve Z.1 |
| 2025-12-31 | 66,618,265 | Federal Reserve Z.1 |
| 2026-03-31 | 64,799,689 | Federal Reserve Z.1 |
Source: Federal Reserve Board, Financial Accounts of the United States (Z.1), release of June 11, 2026, series LM153064475, retrieved September 6, 2026.
Two facts sit next to each other here. Equity wealth grew 15.88% in the year to March 2026 even after a first-quarter dip. The share of adults holding any of it fell. Those are not contradictory: they are what concentration looks like when it deepens rather than widens.
The Retail Leverage Intensity Ratio: How Leveraged Is the Retail Investor?
Margin debt gets quoted as a raw dollar figure, which makes it useless for comparison. The same dollar total means one thing against a small equity base and something else against a large one. Axis Intelligence Research publishes the ratio instead.
Retail Leverage Intensity Ratio (RLIR) measures customer margin borrowing as a share of the household equity wealth it is borrowed against.
- Formula: RLIR (gross) = FINRA debit balances in customers’ securities margin accounts ÷ households and nonprofit organizations’ directly and indirectly held corporate equities × 10,000, expressed in basis points.
- Net variant: RLIR (net) subtracts free credit balances in customers’ cash accounts and securities margin accounts from the numerator, which nets off the idle cash sitting at the same brokers.
- Inputs: FINRA Rule 4521 monthly margin statistics (numerator) and Federal Reserve Z.1 series LM153064475 (denominator). Both are primary filings, both are month-end or quarter-end, and readings are computed only at dates where both inputs exist.
- Scope: the denominator includes nonprofit organizations, which the Federal Reserve does not separate, and the numerator includes institutional customers of FINRA member firms alongside individuals.
RLIR Readings
| Quarter end | Margin debit balances ($ millions) | Household equities ($ millions) | RLIR gross (bps) | RLIR net (bps) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-09-30 | 1,126,494 | 65,130,953 | 172.96 | 111.70 |
| 2025-12-31 | 1,225,597 | 66,618,265 | 183.97 | 122.21 |
| 2026-03-31 | 1,220,922 | 64,799,689 | 188.41 | 122.45 |
Source: Axis Intelligence Research, computed from FINRA and Federal Reserve Z.1 data. Retrieved September 6, 2026.
The gross reading rose 15.45 basis points across two quarters. The net reading rose 10.75 basis points and then flattened, which tells you something the gross number hides: in the first quarter of 2026, brokers’ customers added cash roughly in step with the borrowing, so the marginal leverage came with a cash buffer behind it. That buffer is thin either way. Free credit balances covered 35.01% of margin debt at the end of March 2026 and 29.81% by July.
Sarah Davis: The spread between gross and net RLIR is the honest measure of how much of this is genuinely levered risk. Sixty-six basis points of the March reading is borrowing with no offsetting cash at the same broker. That is the number to watch when the next drawdown arrives, because free credits are what get liquidated first and debit balances are what generate the call.
Is Retail Margin Debt at a Record in 2026?
Yes, and it turned. FINRA member firms carrying margin accounts reported $1,502,072 million of debit balances for June 2026, the highest monthly figure in the series. July came in at $1,417,225 million, a fall of $84,847 million or 5.65% in a single month. Even after that fall, July was 38.60% above July 2025.
FINRA Margin Statistics, Selected Months
| Month | Debit balances ($ millions) | Free credits, cash accounts ($ millions) | Free credits, margin accounts ($ millions) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul-26 | 1,417,225 | 205,132 | 217,305 |
| Jun-26 | 1,502,072 | 217,441 | 223,412 |
| Mar-26 | 1,220,922 | 221,860 | 205,600 |
| Dec-25 | 1,225,597 | 211,720 | 199,762 |
| Sep-25 | 1,126,494 | 204,106 | 194,884 |
| Jul-25 | 1,022,548 | 194,712 | 186,672 |
Source: FINRA, Margin Statistics under Rule 4521, retrieved September 6, 2026.
One caution on reading this series in real time: FINRA publishes in the third week of the month following the reference month, on a settlement-date basis. The number reaching a headline is four to seven weeks old. Anyone quoting margin debt as a live sentiment gauge is quoting last month’s positioning.
ETF Statistics 2026: Where the Retail Money Is Going
If direct stock ownership is where participation is thinning, the fund wrapper is where it is thickening. According to the Investment Company Institute, combined US ETF assets were $15,671.3 billion in July 2026, up $3,915.6 billion or 33.31% from July 2025. Domestic equity ETFs alone held $10,090.4 billion, 64.39% of the total.
US ETF Assets and Fund Counts
| Category | Jul 2026 assets ($ billions) | Jul 2025 assets ($ billions) | Jul 2026 funds | Jul 2025 funds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total domestic equity | 10,090.4 | 7,690.9 | 2,967 | 2,140 |
| Global/international equity | 2,636.5 | 1,790.8 | 975 | 857 |
| Bond | 2,568.3 | 1,996.5 | 978 | 849 |
| Commodities | 315.4 | 231.4 | 137 | 128 |
| Hybrid | 60.8 | 46.2 | 125 | 99 |
| All ETFs | 15,671.3 | 11,755.7 | 5,182 | 4,073 |
Source: Investment Company Institute, Exchange-Traded Fund Data, July 2026, published August 28, 2026, retrieved September 6, 2026.
The fund count is the number nobody frames properly. The US listed 1,109 more ETFs in July 2026 than in July 2025, a 27.23% expansion of the shelf in one year, and 827 of those net additions were domestic equity products. Net issuance ran $1,180.0 billion year to date through July, against $655.9 billion over the same stretch of 2025, a ratio of 1.80 to 1.
Sarah Davis: Product proliferation at 27% a year is a distribution story, not a demand story. Sponsors launch into flows they expect, not flows they have. The domestic equity sleeve took 827 of the net new listings while holding 64.39% of the assets, which means the shelf is getting denser in the single category where a retail buyer already had a hundred adequate choices. Watch the median fund size next year rather than the count.
Investment App Statistics 2026: How Big Is the App-Native Channel?
Robinhood is the cleanest public read on app-native retail because it files the metrics. On June 30, 2026 the firm reported 28.4 million funded customers, up 1.9 million or 7% year over year, and 29.9 million investment accounts. Total platform assets were $368.7 billion, up 32%. Robinhood Gold subscribers reached 4.84 million, a 39% increase, and net deposits over the trailing twelve months were $75.7 billion.
Set against the Federal Reserve’s household equity total, Axis Intelligence Research finds that Robinhood’s entire platform equalled 0.57% of US household equity holdings as of the first quarter of 2026. Average assets per funded customer worked out to roughly $12,982.
Robinhood Retail Metrics, Q2 2026
| Metric | Q2 2026 | Change vs Q2 2025 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funded customers | 28.4 million | +7% | Robinhood Q2 2026 results |
| Investment accounts | 29.9 million | +9% | Robinhood Q2 2026 results |
| Total platform assets | $368.7 billion | +32% | Robinhood Q2 2026 results |
| Gold subscribers | 4.84 million | +39% | Robinhood Q2 2026 results |
| Net deposits, trailing twelve months | $75.7 billion | n/a | Robinhood Q2 2026 results |
Source: Robinhood Markets, Second Quarter 2026 Results, July 29, 2026, retrieved September 6, 2026.
Those two facts belong together. The app channel dominates the cultural narrative about retail investing and holds well under one percent of the equity wealth. Assets grew four and a half times faster than customer count, which is monetization of an existing base rather than recruitment of a new one. The 39% jump in paid Gold subscriptions says the same thing from the revenue side.
Retail Options Trading Statistics 2026: Volume and Mix
Options volume is where retail behavior shows up fastest. OCC cleared 1,603,491,559 option contracts in June 2026, up 45.0% from 1,105,752,074 in June 2025. Year-to-date average daily cleared volume through June was 70,881,815 contracts against 57,343,078 in 2025, a 23.6% increase.
OCC Cleared Options Volume
| Contract type | May 2026 contracts | May 2025 contracts | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Equity options | 803,188,947 | 639,901,447 | +25.5% |
| ETF options | 540,524,362 | 438,481,707 | +23.3% |
| Index options | 122,661,403 | 92,352,497 | +32.8% |
| Total options | 1,466,374,712 | 1,170,735,651 | +25.3% |
Source: OCC monthly volume data, retrieved September 6, 2026.
Equity and ETF options together made up 91.64% of May 2026 cleared volume. That mix is the retail fingerprint: single-name and ETF contracts are where individual accounts trade, while index options skew institutional. Index volume grew fastest in percentage terms and still accounts for under a tenth of contracts.
Sarah Davis: Contract counts are not position sizes. A retail account cycling small weekly contracts generates more volume than a pension desk rolling a single large hedge, and the tape cannot tell you which produced the risk. The number worth having is average premium per contract, and no clearing house publishes it.
What the 2026 Data Says About Retail Behavior
Put the five sources against each other and the shape is consistent. Ownership breadth contracted four points. Equity wealth per owning household rose. Borrowing against that wealth hit a series high on our ratio in the first quarter and a record dollar level in June, then fell 5.65% in July. Fund assets and fund counts both expanded at above 27%. Options volume rose 45% year over year in a single month.
That is not a broadening retail market. It is a deepening one: the same people, holding more, trading more, and borrowing more, while the population outside the market stayed outside it. The Gallup subgroup data from the 2024-2025 combined sample makes the boundary explicit. Ownership ran 87% in households earning $100,000 or more and 28% in households under $50,000; 84% among college graduates against 42% among adults with a high school education or less.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure on this page was retrieved from a primary publisher on September 6, 2026 and logged with its source URL and retrieval date in the accompanying CSV. Sources used: FINRA Rule 4521 margin statistics; Federal Reserve Board Financial Accounts of the United States (Z.1), June 11, 2026 release; Gallup Economy and Personal Finance survey, fielded April 1 to 15, 2026; Investment Company Institute monthly ETF data for July 2026; Robinhood Markets second-quarter 2026 results; and OCC monthly cleared volume reports. No figure on this page is sourced from a secondary aggregator.
RLIR formula. RLIR (gross) = margin debit balances ÷ household directly and indirectly held corporate equities × 10,000. RLIR (net) = (margin debit balances − free credit balances in cash accounts − free credit balances in securities margin accounts) ÷ the same denominator × 10,000. Readings are computed only at quarter-end dates where both a FINRA month-end filing and a Federal Reserve quarter-end level exist, which is why the series begins at September 30, 2025 rather than earlier. This is a baseline series; readings will extend backward as we reconcile the FINRA historical file with prior Z.1 vintages, and forward with each Z.1 release.
Scope of the ratio. The Z.1 denominator covers households and nonprofit organizations combined, and the Federal Reserve does not publish a household-only split for this series. The FINRA numerator aggregates all customer margin accounts at member firms, which includes non-individual customers. Both effects are stable quarter to quarter, so the direction of the series is more reliable than its absolute level.
Timing. FINRA publishes margin statistics in the third week of the month following the reference month, on a settlement-date basis. Z.1 releases quarterly, with the next scheduled for September 10, 2026. Gallup fields the ownership question each April. These cadences are why the readings on this page carry explicit as-of dates rather than a single snapshot date.
Retracted calculation. We attempted a per-owning-household equity figure by dividing Z.1 household equities by the Gallup ownership rate applied to US household counts. That calculation is not published here: Gallup measures adults and Z.1 measures households and nonprofits, and combining them would produce a denominator that does not correspond to either population. The two figures appear side by side above instead.
About This Dataset
Contents. 187 rows covering US stock ownership rates, household equity holdings, margin balances, ETF assets and fund counts, brokerage platform metrics, and cleared options volume, spanning April 2016 through July 2026, with source organization, source document, URL, retrieval date, primary-source flag, and Axis-calculated flag on every row.
License. CC BY 4.0. The dataset may be reused, redistributed, and built upon with attribution.
Citation format: Axis Intelligence Research, Retail Investor Statistics 2026, 2026.
Cite This Research
APA: Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Retail investor statistics 2026: Ownership, ETFs, apps, leverage and trading behavior. https://axis-intelligence.com/retail-investor-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research. “Retail Investor Statistics 2026: Ownership, ETFs, Apps, Leverage and Trading Behavior.” Axis Intelligence, 6 Sept. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/retail-investor-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research. “Retail Investor Statistics 2026: Ownership, ETFs, Apps, Leverage and Trading Behavior.” Axis Intelligence, September 6, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/retail-investor-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Retail Leverage Intensity Ratio and why use it instead of margin debt?
RLIR expresses customer margin borrowing as basis points of the household equity wealth it is borrowed against, so a reading is comparable across years when the market level has changed. Raw margin debt sets a record almost every time the index does. The March 31, 2026 gross reading of 188.41 basis points, computed from FINRA and Federal Reserve Z.1 filings, tells you leverage grew faster than the collateral behind it.
Did stock ownership actually fall in 2026, or is that survey noise?
Gallup’s April 2026 reading of 58% is four points below 2025 and sits within the ±4-point error band on combined national samples, so the single number is not conclusive on its own. Two other questions in the same survey moved the same direction: expected reliance on individual stocks for retirement income fell from 24% to 19% among non-retirees, and 53% called stock investing a bad idea.
Why does the Federal Reserve report $64.80 trillion of household equities when brokerage platforms report far less?
The Z.1 figure counts equities held directly and through mutual funds, ETFs, and retirement accounts across all households and nonprofit organizations. Retail brokerage platforms hold only the self-directed slice. Robinhood’s $368.7 billion of platform assets on June 30, 2026 equalled 0.57% of the Federal Reserve total.
Does record ETF growth mean more people are investing?
Not necessarily. ETF assets rose 33.31% and fund counts rose 27.23% in the year to July 2026 while the ownership rate fell, which is consistent with existing owners allocating more rather than new owners arriving. Net issuance data measures dollars, not accounts, and no US regulator publishes an account-level ETF ownership count.
How current is FINRA margin data when it is published?
FINRA publishes in the third week of the month following the reference month, on a settlement-date basis, so a figure is four to seven weeks old when it reaches the public. The July 2026 reading of $1,417,225 million describes positioning as of July 31, not as of the publication date.
What share of options volume is actually retail?
No clearing house publishes a retail flag on cleared contracts. What the data supports is a mix inference: equity and ETF options were 91.64% of OCC cleared volume in May 2026, and those are the contract types where individual accounts concentrate. Anyone quoting a precise retail percentage of options volume is quoting a vendor model, not a clearing record.
Is the July 2026 drop in margin debt a turning point?
One month is one month. Margin debt fell 5.65% from the June record of $1,502,072 million to $1,417,225 million in July, and it remained 38.60% above July 2025. The reading that will settle it is the next Z.1 release on September 10, 2026, which supplies the denominator for a second-quarter RLIR value.
How concentrated is US stock ownership by income?
In Gallup’s combined 2024-2025 samples, 87% of adults in households earning $100,000 or more owned stock, against 28% in households earning under $50,000. By education the split ran 84% for college graduates and 42% for adults with a high school education or less.