Are You Upper-Middle Class? Economists Say This Group Is Thriving—Here’s How Much Income It Takes

A new study finds the share of families in the upper-middle class has nearly tripled since 1979.

BY AMAYA NICHOLE, NEWS WRITER

Thousand Oaks, California. Photo: Getty Images

Is $133,000 a year enough to be upper-middle class? According to new research, it might be and more Americans are crossing that threshold than ever before.

In a study published earlier this year, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) revealed the share of Americans in the upper-middle class nearly tripled, rising from just 10 percent in 1979 to 31 percent in 2024.

The research shows that over the past five decades, more middle class families have moved up into the upper-middle class, swelling the ranks of the affluent while thinning the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

“The whole distribution of Americans, from poor to rich, has done better over time. And to the extent that fewer people are within a fixed income range that we might think of as middle class, that’s just because everybody’s gotten richer over time,” Scott Winship, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at AEI, told CBS News. 

How Anthropic's Claude AI Became a Co-Founder

Since there is no single, standard definition of middle class—or upper middle class—the AEI report used the federal poverty guidelines to determine which group a family fell into. The economists considered a family earning between five times and 15 times the poverty guideline to be in the upper middle class.

Upper-middle class: $133,000-$400,000

Core middle class: $67,000-$133,000

Lower-middle class: $40,000-$67,000

It’s important to note that the analysis looked just at incomes, not assets such as stocks or real estate.

Additionally, the report found that while the core middle class group is shrinking, this is not because Americans are getting poorer, it’s actually because that group is shrinking too. The share of American families considered poor or near poor dropped from about 30 percent to 19 percent over the same period.

© Inc.com