Are you in the middle class? This calculator will tell you
If a family of two is making a household income of $100,000 in New York City, they would be considered middle class, along with 48 percent of adults in the same area, but if that same couple lived in Cincinnati or northern Kentucky, they would be considered upper class, according to a new calculator released by Pew Research Center.
The nonprofit research center released the calculator earlier this week to help Americans determine where they fall by using location, household income before taxes and number of people within a household to determine their “income tier.”
Rakesh Kochhar, senior researcher at Pew Research Center, tells FOX Business that the calculator was based on government data from as recent as 2016 to determine results, while new numbers from 2017 are expected to be revealed later this week.
Pew’s calculator was also released the same day as it published analysis from 2016 that found that middle-class households are falling and income for the social class has remained stagnant since 2000.
“We found that dating back to the 1970s, the middle class has been shrinking each decade with a little bit of them moving up the income ladder and a little bit of them moving down the income latter. However, overall, there was more movement up than down, but still every decade since then the share of the middle class has decreased,” Kochhar says.
But he says so far in this decade, from 2010-2016, the middle class has stabilized overall with roughly half (52 percent) of American’s falling into that class.
To find out where you stand, you can find Pew’s calculator here.