As of the fourth quarter of 2016, Americans owed a total of $1.31 trillion in student-loan debt — more than for auto loans ($1.16 trillion) or credit card debt ($779 billion). Since there are approximately 126 million households in the United States, this translates to an average of $10,397 in student-loan debt per household.
However, this doesn’t tell the whole story, since fewer than 19% of households owe any money on student loans at all. The roughly 23.2 million households with student loans have an average outstanding debt of $49,905.