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Using household income data, Insider calculated what the middle class looks like across the US.
The share of households that are middle class based on household size and income differs across the nation.
Higher shares are in states like Utah and South Dakota.
South Dakota has the highest share of households that could be considered middle class.
Middle-class households may be feeling stressed out in today’s economy. As Insider previously reported, the upper-middle class in particular is being disproportionately affected financially because of the stock market, soaring inflation, and the debt they are taking on. The middle class overall is feeling the pain of rising prices amid four-decade high inflation.
“Everybody is buying food, everybody is buying gas, everybody’s paying utility bills, so it’s affecting everybody,” Jeffrey Jones, senior editor at Gallup, previously told Insider. “Obviously, upper-income people can absorb those price increases easier than lower-income people can.”
Half of adults were in middle-class households in the US in 2021, according to Pew Research Center. That’s about the same as the 51% a decade earlier in 2011 and down from the 59% in 1981, according to another analysis from Pew Research Center. Insider decided to look at how this looks at the household level across the country.
The map below shows the share of households in a state or DC that fall into the middle class:
You can hover over the places on the above map to see the share of households in a particular state, or DC, that are middle class by our calculations, as well as the 2019 median household income for that state or DC.
As seen in the above map, many of these shares are not too far away from 50%. California and New York are two states that had shares under 50% — 46.9% and 46.3% respectively. Idaho, South Dakota, and Wyoming are three of the states that had shares over 50%.
To create the above map, Insider used 2019 one-year data on median household income for various household sizes from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. We looked at different household sizes because as Pew Research Center pointed out in one report, “the income it takes to be middle income varies by household size, with smaller households requiring less to support the same lifestyle as larger households.”
Additionally, Pew Research Center wrote that “‘middle-income’ adults in 2021 are those with an annual household income that was two-thirds to double the national median income in 2020, after incomes have been adjusted for household size.”
So, we used two-thirds and double the median household income for the different household sizes in our calculations. Because of this, the ranges of household income to be considered middle class varied within a state based on the size of a household.
For instance, the median household income in 2019 for one-person households in California was $41,492, which makes the middle-class income range for this household size in the state from about $27,661 to $82,984 based on Pew Research Center’s definition. At the same time, the range for four-person households in the state would be from about $71,077 to $213,232 because the median household income in 2019 for this size was $106,616.
After finding the various ranges by household size by state and DC, we then analyzed 2019 American Community Survey data available on IPUMS to figure out how many households could potentially be considered middle class.
It’s important to note that there isn’t simply just one definition for middle-class households. There are also different analyses out there that use different methodologies to examine the income people in different places throughout the country need to fall into the middle class. This includes GOBankingRates‘s analysis of income ranges that also used Pew Research Center’s definition and American Community Survey data, but family income values, as well as an analysis from 24/7 Wall St. and Zippia.