Definitions of Terms
While Latino and Hispanic are frequently used interchangeably, they can convey different meanings. Latino, short for Latinoamerican, refers to people of Latin American origin. Latin America includes all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere that speak a Romance Language (more specifically, Spanish and Portuguese).
The term Hispanic is representative of a slightly different group that includes only people who are from Spanish-speaking countries, including Spain. Because of this and our focus on people of South and Central American origins in this analysis, we will use the term Latino for continuity. Lastly, the terms Latino and Hispanic refer only to ancestry, with individuals identifying as either or both categories being from a variety of racial and ethnic groups.
Demographics
Latinos are the fastest-growing demographic group in the United States. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the majority of growth in the Latino population came from births rather than immigration. However, this trend saw a reversal in the 2020s as immigration rates overtook new births as the primary driver of Latino population growth.
Latinos are diverse racially, with about 12% identifying as being of Afro-Latino origin. Latinos of Mexican origin comprise the majority (57%), with Puerto Ricans representing 9% of the total US Latino population, Cubans at 4.34% and Dominicans at 3.63%. California and Texas have the largest Latino populations in the country with 16.1 million and 12.6 million, respectively. However, New Mexico contains the largest share of Latinos relative to its total population (47%).
Wealth Accumulation
Latino household wealth has grown over time but remains far below the wealth of non-Latino White households. In 2022, the median Latino household had a net worth of $62,120 compared to $284,310 for White households. Up until 2016, the gap between the two groups was steady at about 12%, meaning the median Latino household had 1 dollar for every 8 dollars that a median White household had. However, between 2016 and 2022, the gap narrowed from 8 to 1 to about 5 to 1.
Similar to Black households, Latinos are more dependent on home equity to build wealth than White households. From 2013 to 2022, over half of Latino wealth gains came from home equity, while only 20% of the wealth gains came from home equity for White households. This has been accompanied by an increase in Latino homeowners, pushing their homeownership rate from 45% in 2023 up to 51% in 2023. For the first time since the steady increase in lending to Latino borrowers began in 2018, the Latino population share of the home purchase mortgage market(17.7%) exceeded their share of the total population (16.8%) in 2025. This is due to the increased financial clout of moderate and higher-income Latinos.
Furthermore, the median value of Latino home equity increased 22% to $135,000 between 2019 and 2022. While increases in homeownership are a net positive, the increased dependence on home equity makes Latino communities vulnerable to economic shocks, such as in the Great Financial Crash of 2008.
Stock ownership among Latinos has significantly increased over the past decade. In 2013, around 2.5% of all Latino households reported owning some sort of stock share. By 2022, 8% of Latino households reported direct stock ownership, with a median holding value of $10,000.
While Latino homeownership and stockownership rates are improving, access to liquid assets (namely bank deposits) remains a challenge. About two-thirds of Latino households are liquid asset poor, meaning they don’t have enough savings they can quickly use to cover basic needs for three months if they lose their main income. About 14.8% of Latino adults are unbanked compared to the national average of 4.2%, highlighting the need for increasing access to financial services for Latino Americans.
Income and Poverty
The US Latino population’s median household income growth has surpassed that of other racial/ethnic groups, peaking at $70,950 in 2024. From 2014 to 2024, the average Latino household income increased by almost 30%, 8% higher than the national average.
Interestingly, income and poverty levels differ greatly among Latino subgroups. Among the groups with a population of at least 1 million, Ecuadorians and Colombians have the highest median household income. On the flip side, Hondurans and Guatemalans have the highest poverty levels. Differences in educational attainment, legal status and the particularities of their journey to the United States are partly why some Latino subgroups have higher income and lower poverty rates than others.Â
Work and Labor
Latinos feature prominently in the US economy. One long-running characteristic of Latino workers is their high labor force participation rate. 67.1% of Latinos are in the labor force compared to 62.4% for the overall population. The median age of Latino Americans is 31, compared to the median age of non-Latino Americans being 41 years old. This contributes to their higher labor force participation rates because of the higher share of Latinos in their prime working years.
While Latinos can be found throughout the labor force, they are over-concentrated in some sectors, such as the construction and hospitality industries. The share of Latino construction workers increased from 20% to 30% from 2003 to 2020. Within construction, Latinos are concentrated in the core construction jobs, such as day laborers, rather than in management roles.
Other jobs where Latino men are more likely to work are in agriculture and maintenance occupations. Latina workers are concentrated in the leisure/hospitality, healthcare and other service industries and are disproportionately found in lower-wage, “segregated” occupations.
Education Attainment
Latinos have been making large strides in education. In 2023, 21% of Latinos had a bachelor’s degree or higher compared to 14% in 2013. While some of this increase comes from the migration of educated Latinos to the US, much of it comes from increases in college enrollment. From 2012 to 2022, undergraduate and graduate enrollment for this demographic group increased by 23% and 69%, respectively. Over half of Latinos enrolled in college attend a Hispanic-Serving Institution, colleges where Hispanic/Latinos comprise at least 25% of the undergraduate population.
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