Is 200k a year good in the United States? What about in a place like New York City? What is a “good” income anyways? A few weeks ago I wro

Is 200k a Year Good? [What the Data Says]

submited by

Style Pass

2023-03-16 04:00:03

Is 200k a year good in the United States? What about in a place like New York City? What is a “good” income anyways?

A few weeks ago I wrote a post called, “How Much Income Do You Need to Be Rich?” where I examined the upper end of the income spectrum in the U.S. by both age and education level. Though that post was meant to look at incomes of the highest earning households, I got a lot of follow-up questions about the rest of the income distribution as well.

In particular, one reader asked me whether making $200k a year was considered a good income. So, I’d thought I’d answer this question by doing another deep-dive on household income in the U.S. before providing my thoughts on what constitutes a “good” income.

If you took every household in the U.S. and lined them up based on their household income, the household right in the middle of the line would make approximately $70,000 a year. Half of the households would make more than this amount and half would make less. This was the median household income in the U.S. in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and it’s a great starting point for our discussion.