It’s really hard to come up with any objective measure.
It’s hard to nail down what “middle class” means in the United States. Between lower, middle, and upper, “middle class” is the only label that most Americans want to describe them. Nobody wants to be poor, and most people who are upper class pretend to be middle class to avoid sounding pretentious (only 2 percent of Americans self-identify as “upper class”). It’s also not always clear whether labels such as “middle class” only refer to income or include other values and lifestyle characteristics that could be held or practiced by people of any income.
Pew Research has an updated definition of “middle class,” and it’s based on income and cost of living. It says that middle-income households are ones with incomes between two-thirds and twice the level of median U.S. household income. That would mean households with incomes between $56,600 and $169,800 in 2022, on average.
Right away, it’s easy to see that this definition of “middle class” is biased upward. The middle 50 percent of the household-income distribution (the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile) would be in the neighborhood of $40,000 to $140,000, according to Census data.
Defining “middle class” higher is not necessarily a bad thing, as it reflects the fact that the upper middle class has been growing over the past few decades. As another Pew study from earlier this year found that the middle class is smaller today than it was in the 1970s, but that’s because the upper class has been growing faster than the lower class.
People in places with a high cost of living will always be quick to rebut income-based definitions of classes. They’ll say something along the lines of, “$200,000 might be a lot of money if you live out in the sticks, but here in the big city, we’re just scraping by!”
Pew’s definition adjusts for cost of living. It gives this example to illustrate:
Jackson, Tennessee, is a relatively inexpensive area, with a price level in 2022 that was 13.0% less than the national average. The San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metropolitan area in California is one of the most expensive, with a price level that was 17.9% higher than the national average. Thus, to step over the national middle-class threshold of $56,600, a household in Jackson needs an income of only about $49,200, or 13.0% less than the national threshold. But a household in the San Francisco area needs an income of about $66,700, or 17.9% more than the U.S. threshold, to be considered middle class.
This implies that a household making $200,194 in San Francisco would be the upper bound of “middle class” in that city, using Pew’s definition. That would be just about the highest possible household income to be considered “middle class” anywhere in the U.S.
Nationally, only 14.4 percent of households have incomes greater than $200,000. So a household in San Francisco could be “middle class” while having an income higher than 85.6 percent of U.S. households.
If that San Francisco household making $200,000 has income-earners who work remotely, they could move to an area with a lower cost of living (just about anywhere else in the U.S.) and instantly become “upper class” without their jobs or paychecks changing at all.
This isn’t a flaw in Pew’s methodology. It’s merely a concession to the reality that it’s really hard to define what “middle class” means, and people are going to be upset no matter how you do it.