![[OC] US Individual Income Distribution (2024)](https://www.europesays.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/86u4eywta1qe1-1920x1024.png)
Graphic by me, created in excel. Income data from dqydj.com (US Census survey). Class distinctions from resourcegeneration.org.
Obviously income is just one component of class, and varies greatly by location. This is not meant to gatekeep or fully define "classes", only to show how income compares to the rest of US workers.
For example if you make $102,000 you may not be upper class, but you are in the "upper class of income" and make more than 80%+ of other workers.
Posted by TA-MajestyPalm
23 comments
Graphic by me, created in excel. Income data from [dqydj.com (US Census survey)](https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-percentiles/). Class distinctions from [resourcegeneration.org](https://resourcegeneration.org/breakdown-of-class-characteristics-income-brackets/)
Obviously income is just one component of class, and varies greatly by location. This is not meant to gatekeep or fully define “classes”, only to show how income compares to the rest of US workers.
For example if you make $102,000 you may not be upper class, but you are in the “upper class of income” and make more than 80%+ of other workers.
It’s interesting to think about as often the largest disparities in wealth are due to marriage rates within different groups which coincides with things such as education but also mainly rural vs urban. It probably wont surprise many people where the bottom half of this chart lives. Though farmers do make quite a substantial sum most people living in rural areas are not farmers.
If you’re purely using income to describe classes, I would avoid using terms like “working class” and “owning class”. Those terms step pretty heavily into describing labor’s relation to the means of production, not how much they make from that labor. Anyone who sells their labor in exchange for money is part of the “working class”.
I know it gets semantically confusing because, especially in America, we also use “class” to refer to income, but something like “lower class” would probably be more appropriate, and maybe “wealthy” for the top 1%, given that their income does not at all dictate whether they are part of the “owning class”. That one feels especially weird because it very explicitly refers whether or not they “own” the means of production.
Is this salary income or does it include income from capital investments?
It is a nice view, but it does strikes me as an odd definition of “middle”, it’s an odd choice to leave out a good number of Working Class from that definition. I would think “middle” should be balanced around the median.
I wonder if household income is probably a more interesting metric than individual, as many stay-at-home spouses would be classified as ‘poor’. This also ignores the income-balancing that happens when people of different classes marry or cohabitate.
$430k isn’t the owning class though. That’s a mid-level software engineer or mid-career consultant, banker, lawyer, etc.
The owning class makes their money through, you know, owning stuff, like shares in the companies they found, not ordinary income.
If it’s not meant to gatekeep, it would probably be best to leave the class definitions out of it.
Nobody in their right mind would consider $25k “working class”, regardless of where you live in the country, that’s poor. There are high school students making more than $25k a year and you basically can’t live in a cardboard box as an individual earning that much money.
I’d also argue that this chart stopping at $400k a year is grossly under representing the fact that many people make millions a year. The chart makes wealth disparity look substantially less than it actually is in reality.
Technically I’m middle class, but that money goes a lot further in rural areas than NYC where I actually live
Lumping the 1% in with the .1% and the .01% causes a total mischaracterization of the reality and a totally skewed graphic visual.
Even if you only account for personal income, the .1% are at 800k+ and the .01% jumps to the north of 20 million. The .01% account for 1 3rd of the 1%’s personal income, so they really must have their own delineated metric. They are independently relevant.
When you do that, you start to have visually relevant representation of income inequality because there is essentially a flat field and then a single massive spike for the .01% that is 50 times larger than any other data point….
The more relevant data is the spending ability of the classes anyway.
TL;DR : Don’t aggregate wildly disparate data points to make a graph pretty.
Working class means blue collar or labor. Not income level.
Okay the fact “**Middle class**” is defined here by the 4th of 5 20% quintiles is a serious problem. 60% of people are below middle class? Being in the very lowest ranks of middle class puts you in the top 40% income group? This needs to be redefined. Middle class should be the middle 50%. With 25% below and 25% above. And then, you can clearly see the American “middle class” has a rather low income (between $25k and $85k probably).
A better chart separates the top 1% into smaller fractions, that’s where it gets really wild.
Wealth is also a fun chart
“Wealth Distribution” is the much more interesting graph
[dqydj.com](http://dqydj.com) is a really cool website too.
Would like to see gender specific versions of this figure, since a lot of girls always say they want 6 digits income guy.
My wife is a teacher and is upper class? It took her 20+ years to just cross into six figures. Not sure this labeling is accurate.
430k is def not owning class. The owning class doesn’t even work. Fun fact Josh Allen‘s $55 million a year salary would have to be earned for 3600 years to have 200 billion like Elon.
I feel like lumping the top end into “1%” actually skews the data a little bit – what would it look like if we broke it into top 1% and top 0.1%?
split the top 1% out into 10 more lines. the top line will make you have to scroll down 2 meters.
Are those income before or after Personal Income Tax and other taxes ?
In Europe, social contributions (for health insurance, retirement, unemployment benefits) will represent 20-30% of gross revenue, and PIT will again be about 10-20% of gross revenue.
What about retired and unemployed people?
The owning class is a measure of wealth not income. You can make a top 1% income for decades, save most of it and still not even make it close to the top 1% of wealth. The class distinctions in this graph are total BS.
the real “owning class” doesn’t have a $500,000 day job salary. they have millions of dollars of unrealized gains per year.
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