Roughly half of US Latinos say the American dream is either out of reach or does not exist, while the other half say they have achieved it or are on their way, according to a major Pew Research Center survey published September 1. The findings reveal a community divided along generational and immigration lines over whether upward mobility is still a realistic prospect.
A community split on opportunity
The findings come from Pew Research Center’s National Survey of Latinos, a nationally representative, bilingual survey of 4,923 US Latino adults conducted in October 2025. Latinos now account for one in five Americans and are the nation’s second-largest racial or ethnic group.
Only 20 percent of Latino respondents say they have already achieved the American dream, while 18 percent believe it is out of reach and another 27 percent say it simply does not exist. A further 33 percent say they are still on their way to achieving it.
Latinos’ attitudes about the attainability of the American dream are roughly in line with those of other Americans, but Latinos are more upbeat about intergenerational progress. Among other US adults, 28 percent say they have achieved the American dream and 29 percent say they are on their way to achieving it, while 19 percent say it is out of reach and 23 percent say it does not exist.
Homeownership and financial security define the dream
To understand what the concept means to US Hispanics, researchers asked respondents to describe the American dream in their own words. About six in ten Hispanics tie the American dream to financial or economic factors. Hispanics most often link the American dream to financial or economic factors, self-fulfillment or collective well-being.
That framing is directly tied to urban economic realities, where home prices in major Latino population centers have surged well beyond median household income.
The phrase “the American dream” has long been used to describe hopes associated with life in the United States. Over time, it has come to encompass many ideals, including economic mobility, homeownership, political freedoms and equality. For the Latinos surveyed, the economic dimension came first.
The results are relevant to millions of workers in cities such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, and Miami, places where positive macroeconomic metrics coexist with challenging conditions for households in areas with high Hispanic density.
Immigrant optimism versus US-born skepticism
Some 70 percent of immigrant Latinos say their standard of living is better than that of their parents at the same age, while about half of US-born Latinos (49 percent) say the same.
That gap widened when respondents looked ahead: 63 percent of immigrants expected their children to have a higher standard of living than their own, while among US-born Latinos the figure dropped to 48 percent.
Immigrants are less likely than the US-born to say the American dream has become harder to achieve. Hispanic adults share broadly positive views about how standards of living have improved for themselves and are likely to improve for their children, and immigrants are more upbeat than US-born Hispanics across these measures.
US-born Latinos express greater skepticism about advancement. That pattern is consistent with findings on dual-income families facing structural cost pressures that erode wage gains.
What the numbers mean for cities
Published around the country’s 250th anniversary, the report explores how Latinos see the American dream today: their achievement of it, its meaning, its durability, and their outlook on other aspects of economic mobility. Overall, far more Latinos say their standard of living is better than their parents’ (57 percent) rather than worse (23 percent), and more also say their children’s standard of living will be better than their own (53 percent) as opposed to worse (14 percent).
The survey adds statistical weight to a pattern urban researchers have flagged for years: proximity to jobs and affordable housing are inseparable from whether residents feel economic mobility is possible. Workers who cannot afford to live near employment centers face longer commutes, higher transportation costs, and less time for the family and community investments that typically underpin upward mobility.
The Pew data on homeownership aspirations, framed as the most common description of the American dream among Hispanic respondents, maps directly onto that geography of access.
The analysis is based on Pew Research Center’s latest National Survey of Latinos, conducted October 6 to 16, 2025, among a sample of 8,046 US adults, of whom 4,923 were Hispanic. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 1.7 percentage points. The full report was written by Luis Noé-Bustamante, Ziyao Tian, Carolyne Im, and Sahana Mukherjee and is available at the Pew Research Center. For context on how survey methodology shapes findings of this kind, see Pew’s own review of opt-in poll reliability.
