Sometimes people look at general income data and wonder, “How could people raise a family on that?” The answer in many cases is, “They don’t.”
The new income data for 2023 from the Census Bureau puts the U.S. median household income at $80,610. But looking at that number alone misses considerable variability.
Family households in the U.S. have a median income of $102,800, according to the Census Bureau. Nonfamily households have a median income of $49,600. There are 84.7 million family households and 47.5 million nonfamily households.
The Census Bureau defines those terms as follows:
A family household is a household maintained by a householder who is related to at least one other person in the household by birth, marriage, or adoption and includes any unrelated individuals who may be residing there. A nonfamily household is a householder living alone (a one-person household) or sharing the home exclusively with nonrelatives.
It makes perfect sense that a category that primarily includes households with one person would have a much lower median income than a category that includes only households with more than one person. That isn’t a problem at all because households with one person also have much lower expenses than households with more than one person. Though some of the nonfamily households have people who would like to start families but can’t, many are content not to have families or will someday have families but just aren’t there yet.
Marriage should be the first step to starting a family, and married-couple family households have a median income of $119,400. That is by far the most common type of family household, at 62.3 million. The 15.2 million single-female-headed family households have a median income of $59,470. The 7.2 million single-male-headed family households have a median income of $81,890.
So if you’re thinking about how someone could raise a family on some level of income, and your definition of “family” is “married couple with children,” you can take some comfort in the fact that right now the median income for those families is in the neighborhood of $120,000. (The $119,400 number includes married couples without children, but we know from other Census Bureau data that they have a slightly lower median income than those with children.)
That puts the median American married couple with children solidly in the upper-middle class, as defined by income. And that’s the median, not the mean, so it isn’t affected by wealthy outliers.
Yet these are households that politicians portray as downtrodden and want to shower with government benefits such as child-care subsidies, child-tax-credit expansion, mandated paid parental leave, housing subsidies, college subsidies/loan forgiveness, greater K–12 education spending, and universal pre-K. They probably have in mind poor families with two parents working when they envision these programs. Such families exist, but they are rare compared with the well-off families that would reap most of the benefits from these programs. A government already running a massive deficit should not be expanding benefits to households making $120,000 a year.