The Income by Age calculator below provides the income percentiles of U.S. households in 2022 for a given age.
Data comes from the Survey of Consumer Finances.
Your Income Percentile:
Best Practices
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- Examine the ages around your age for a more comprehensive overview of the data.
- The higher you go up the income scale, the harder it is to get an accurate gauge of how much people are making, especially once we subset to a specific age. Therefore, I recommend checking the households slightly older and younger than you to get a better picture of how well you are doing when it comes to generating income.
- Most percentiles are NOT strongly influenced by outliers.
- One thing that some people get confused about when seeing data like this is how these numbers are influenced by outliers (e.g. high income households). When calculating something like the “average income” outliers make a big difference. For example, imagine a bar with 9 people in it who each earn $100,000. If Bill Gates walks in to the bar (who generally earns hundreds of millions each year from his stock sales), the average income in the bar would surge. Unfortunately, this figure tells you little about the typical income of the bar’s patrons. However, percentile calculations (such as the median/50th percentile) would still be useful even with someone such as Mr. Gates being present.
- Therefore, if you are 30 years old with an income of $80,000, this would put you around the 50th percentile (median) of income among 30 year-old households in the United States. This figure is NOT influenced by super high-earning 30 year-old households in any significant way. However, if you wanted to find what income would get you to the 99th percentile among 30 year-old U.S. households, outliers would influence this figure a bit more. Just something to keep in mind as you look through the data.
- Examine the ages around your age for a more comprehensive overview of the data.
If you found this calculator helpful, check out my other calculators along with my book, Just Keep Buying, for proven ways to save money and build your wealth.
