Is $100,000 middle class in America?
There’s a prolonged pause when you ask Lyft driver Gaby Osegueda if her family is middle class. Her smile fades as she thinks about it for a while.
“Yeah, I think so. I don’t even know what the middle class is anymore,” says Oseguarda, who with her husband earns nearly $100,000 a year in the San Francisco area.
The majority of Americans — 62 percent — identify as “middle class,” according to a Gallup poll conducted in June. It’s the highest percent of people feeling that way since 2003. But a lot of Americans are like Osegueda: They feel middle class, but they aren’t sure what it means.
Just who exactly is middle class is in the national spotlight again as President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress craft tax cuts for individuals and corporations that they say will primarily benefit the middle. But amid this discussion, the middle class has been defined in different ways. Gary Cohn, Trump’s top economic adviser, recently discussed how a “typical family” making $100,000 a year would benefit. Trump has espoused the value of the plan to truckers, who make around $41,000 a year.
So what is the middle class? In America, an income of $59,000 a year is smack dab in the middle, according to the U.S. Census. But it’s not that simple. No exact definition
There is no exact definition of middle class, and a deep look at the data shows a wide variety of individuals could be part of it, depending on where they live and how big their family is. The middle class in San Francisco, where Osegueda lives, is not the same as it is in Peoria, Ill.
Osegueda and her husband are in their early 30s. Both have college degrees — she also has a master’s — and launched careers in San Francisco’s booming tech industry. She worked in human resources and he’s an engineer. They love San Francisco, but a year ago, they moved to Pacifica, a suburb, where rent is more affordable and their young son has space to play. Despite making nearly $100,000 a year, they aren’t sure they’ll ever own a home of their own, at least not anywhere in the Bay Area.
It’s not just San Francisco. A quick glance at the median income in these six American cities highlights how much it varies:
• Newton, Mass.: $122,100
• Washington, $70,800 • Denver: $53,600 • Dallas: $43,800 • Birmingham, $31,200 • Flint, Mich.: $24,900 Now take a look at how median income varies by family size. The median D.C.: Ala.: income for single people in America is just $30,400. For a household of two, it jumps to $65,600. For three, it’s nearly $77,000. For four, it’s $91,000 (not far from Cohn’s definition of $100,000 for a family of four). You get the idea. The more people in a family, the more money they typically need to live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
Just over half
When Americans talk about the “middle class,” they are usually thinking about a range, not just the specific income dead in the middle. Pew Research says the middle class runs from $42,000 to $125,000. They define middle as a household of three with an income that falls between two-thirds and double the median income. By Pew’s calculation, just over half of American households are truly middle class, far smaller than the 62 percent who self-identify that way.
To dig further into the data, the Washington Post opted to define middle class as American households with incomes that fall between the 30th percentile mark and the 80th percentile mark. It captures half of U.S. households, but the range is skewed high enough so that someone would have to be well above the poverty line and earn at least $16 an hour in a full-time job to qualify.
America’s middle-class ranges from $35,000 to $122,500 in annual income, according to the Post’s calculation.The bottom line is: $100,000 is on the middle-class spectrum, but barely: 75 percent of U.S. households make less than that.
In Beattyville, Ky., a place dubbed “America’s poorest white town,” median income is only $16,000 and a typical home costs only $53,000.
On the other end of the spectrum are rapidly developing cities like the San Francisco area, where Osegueda lives. The median income is a whopping $136,000 in Palo Alto, the hub of Silicon Valley. Even engineers at Facebook have been struggling to pay their rent. Being able to save for a home seems even more of an implausible scenario. ‘Kind of insane’
“My husband and I sometimes look at each other and say, what are we doing here? A house here costs a million dollars,” Osegueda says. “It’s kind of insane when you think about it.”
Osegueda and her husband once lived in the trendy Mission District of San Francisco, but they moved out of the city when apartments on their block started renting for $4,000 a month for a one-bedroom. Osegueda has been staying home to take care of her 1-year-old son, but she drives a few days a week for ride-share service Lyft to help the family budget and mingle with people.