Graph and download economic data for Share of Net Worth Held by the Top 1% (99th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBST01134) from Q3 1989 to Q2 2025 about net worth, wealth, percentile, Net, and USA.

In 2024, the mean household income of the bottom quintile in the United States was 18,460 U.S. dollars. Meanwhile, the top five percent of households brought in 560,000 U.S. dollars. Since the 1990s, the gap between top and bottom earners has widened. Among all households, the Gini index measure for income inequality has also increased.

This table presents income shares, thresholds, tax shares, and total counts of individual Canadian tax filers, with a focus on high income individuals (95% income threshold, 99% threshold, etc.). Income thresholds are geography-specific; for example, the number of Nova Scotians in the top 1% will be calculated as the number of taxfiling Nova Scotians whose total income exceeded the 99% income threshold of Nova Scotian tax filers. Different definitions of income are available in the table namely market, total, and after-tax income, both with and without capital gains.

In 2025, just over 45 percent of American households had an annual income that was less than 75,000 U.S. dollars. On the other hand, some 16 percent had an annual income of 200,000 U.S. dollars or more. The median household income in the country reached almost 84,000 U.S. dollars in 2024. Income and wealth in the United States After the economic recession in 2009, income inequality in the U.S. is more prominent across many metropolitan areas. The Northeast region is regarded as one of the wealthiest in the country. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maryland were among the states with the highest median household income in 2024. In terms of income by race and ethnicity, the average income of Asian households was highest, at over 120,000 U.S. dollars, while the median income among Black households was around half of that figure. What is the U.S. poverty threshold? The U.S. Census Bureau annually updates the poverty threshold based on the income of various household types. As of 2023, the threshold for a single-person household was 15,480 U.S. dollars. For a family of four, the poverty line increased to 31,200 U.S. dollars. There were an estimated 38.9 million people living in poverty across the United States in 2024, which reflects a poverty rate of 10.6 percent.

In the first quarter of 2025, almost ********** of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners. In comparison, the lowest ** percent of earners only owned *** percent of the total wealth. Income inequality in the U.S. Despite the idea that the United States is a country where hard work and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps will inevitably lead to success, this is often not the case. In 2024, *** percent of U.S. households had an annual income under 15,000 U.S. dollars. With such a small percentage of people in the United States owning such a vast majority of the country’s wealth, the gap between the rich and poor in America remains stark. The top one percent The United States was the country with the most billionaires in the world in 2025. Elon Musk, with a net worth of *** billion U.S. dollars, was among the richest people in the United States in 2025. Over the past 50 years, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio has exploded, causing the gap between rich and poor to grow, with some economists theorizing that this gap is the largest it has been since right before the Great Depression.

Graph and download economic data for Share of Financial Assets Held by the Top 1% (99th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBST01112) from Q3 1989 to Q2 2025 about wealth, percentile, financial, assets, and USA.

Graph and download economic data for Minimum Wealth Cutoff for the Top 0.1% (99.9th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBLTP1311) from Q3 1989 to Q3 2022 about wealth, percentile, and USA.

In 2024, about 44.7 percent of White households in the United States had an annual median income of over 100,000 U.S. dollars. By comparison, only 26.8 percent of Black households were in this income group. Asian Americans, on the other hand, had the highest median income per household that year.

In Mexico, as of 2022, the bottom 50 percent, which represents the population whose income lied below the median, earned on average 2,076 euros at purchasing power parity (PPP) before income taxes. Meanwhile, the top ten percent had an average earning of 111,484 euros, 53 times over than the average earning of the bottom half. Further, the bottom 50 percent accounted for -0.3 percent of the overall national wealth in Mexico, that is, they have on average more debts than assets.

In September 2025, the top one percent of earners in the United Kingdom received an average pay of 16,212 British pounds per month, compared with the bottom ten percent of earners who earned around 855 pounds a month.

Graph and download economic data for Share of Corporate Equities and Mutual Fund Shares Held by the Top 1% (99th to 100th Wealth Percentiles) (WFRBST01122) from Q3 1989 to Q2 2025 about mutual funds, wealth, equity, percentile, corporate, and USA.

Income of individuals by age group, sex and income source, Canada, provinces and selected census metropolitan areas, annual.

Graph and download economic data for Median Personal Income in the United States (MEPAINUSA646N) from 1974 to 2024 about personal income, personal, median, income, and USA.

This statistic shows the share of overall income held by the richest 1 percent of each country in 2005. The richest top percent of U.S. citizens had an income share of 17.4 percent of the country's total income. Since 1949, the U.S. has experienced a leap in inequality while an equally marked drop has occurred in the Netherlands.

The bottom 50 percent in Russia earned an average of 7.7 thousand euros at purchasing power parity (PPP) before income tax in 2021. To compare, the mean income of the top 10 percent stood at 104.6 thousand euros in the same year. Looking at the percentage distribution of national wealth in the country, the poorest half held only three percent of the total in 2021.

How sensitive to business cycles are the earnings of top earners? And, how does the business cycle sensitivity of top earners vary by industry? We use a confidential dataset on earnings histories of US males from the Social Security Administration. On average, individuals in the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution are slightly more cyclical than the population average. But there are large differences across sectors; top earners in Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) and Construction face substantial business cycle volatility, whereas those in Services (who make up 40 percent of individuals in the top 1 percent) have earnings that are less cyclical than the average worker.

The bottom 50 percent in Argentina earned on average 15,057 U.S. dollars at purchasing power parity (PPP) before income taxes as of 2022, while individuals in the top one percent earned pre-tax more than 686,433 dollars. Looking at the percentage distribution of wealth in Argentina, the poorest half held 5.7 percent of the total in 2021. Moreover, the top one percent in the South American country accounted for 25.7 percent of the overall national wealth.

The Distributional Financial Accounts (DFAs) provide a quarterly measure of the distribution of U.S. household wealth since 1989, based on a comprehensive integration of disaggregated household-level wealth data with official aggregate wealth measures. The data set contains the level and share of each balance sheet item on the Financial Accounts' household wealth table (Table B.101.h), for various sub-populations in the United States. In our core data set, aggregate household wealth is allocated to each of four percentile groups of wealth: the top 1 percent, the next 9 percent (i.e., 90th to 99th percentile), the next 40 percent (50th to 90th percentile), and the bottom half (below the 50th percentile). Additionally, the data set contains the level and share of aggregate household wealth by income, age, generation, education, and race. The quarterly frequency makes the data useful for studying the business cycle dynamics of wealth concentration--which are typically difficult to observe in lower-frequency data because peaks and troughs often fall between times of measurement. These data will be updated about 10 or 11 weeks after the end of each quarter, making them a timely measure of the distribution of wealth.

The average pre-tax income of the top ten percent earners in Spain was over 120,000 euros at purchasing power parity (PPP) as of 2024, almost nine times more than the average income of the bottom half earners. Looking at the distribution of national income in Spain, the earnings of the least affluent half of the population equated to 21 percent of the total country income in 2024, 0.1 percentage points less than one decade earlier. Moreover, the top one percent of earners in Spain accounted for over ten percent of the overall national income.