$500,000 a year to be a 1percenter in Colorado

About 56 percent of tax filers in state reported income below $50,000

What does it take to join the top 1 percent of earners in Colorado? Somewhere around $500,000 in adjusted gross income provides admission into the exclusive group.

And while a lot of people dream about breaking out on their own, that path doesn’t bring down big money for most. About 18.1 percent of Colorado tax returns reported business or professional income. But those sole proprietors brought in just 3.3 percent of the income reported on tax returns.

Those are a few of the details to emerge from a review of 2016 individual tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service by Colorado taxpayers.

Adjusted Gross Income includes wages, interest, dividends, business income, partnership proceeds, retirement fund payouts and net capital gains, but excludes the bulk of Social Security. Deducted from the total income number are items like pretax contributions to retirement plans, the standard deduction and other tax breaks.

There were 2,648,930 tax returns filed in Colorado in 2016, with an adjusted gross income of $194.4 billion, which works out to an average of $73,621 per return. About 56 percent of filers reported an income below $50,000.

“Those numbers are striking when you look at the percentage of people that are actually getting by on that low an income,” said Rich Jones, policy and research director at the Bell Policy Center, a Denver nonprofit that advocates for economic mobility.

The numbers seem to confirm a longrunning trend of more households dropping to the low end of the scale, a bulge toward the high end, and a middle that is getting thinner, he said.