I just looked at the Zillow’s current average rent for 2 bedroom dwellings in a few states.
Yeah, most of these incomes, if they are household incomes, are basically on the threshold of the ‘Makes 3x more than the rent’ number, either slightly above it or slightly below it.
So ‘middle class’ apparently means 2 bedroom apartment/townhome/home, that you are renting.
In the 90s, middle class was more like… you have a 3 or 4 bedroom house, that you have a mortgage on, with a front and back yard, 2 - 3 kids, 2 - 3 cars, maybe also a small boat or camper or jetski or something, and probably a decent vacation once a year.
Pew here has just completely arbitrarily defined 2/3 the median income (presumably household) as the lower bound of middle class.
So the median household income is about $83k in 2025.
So, 2/3 of that is ~55k, 4/3 is ~111k.
Thats what Pew says the middle class is, just entirely based on taking the median and making a belt around it, not factoring in actual costs of anything at all.
This is basically completely useless, to define ‘middle class’ this way. Totally arbitrary, totally unrelated to actual lifestyle and things you have and can do.
Yeah this is a joke.
I just looked at the Zillow’s current average rent for 2 bedroom dwellings in a few states.
Yeah, most of these incomes, if they are household incomes, are basically on the threshold of the ‘Makes 3x more than the rent’ number, either slightly above it or slightly below it.
So ‘middle class’ apparently means 2 bedroom apartment/townhome/home, that you are renting.
In the 90s, middle class was more like… you have a 3 or 4 bedroom house, that you have a mortgage on, with a front and back yard, 2 - 3 kids, 2 - 3 cars, maybe also a small boat or camper or jetski or something, and probably a decent vacation once a year.
Pew here has just completely arbitrarily defined 2/3 the median income (presumably household) as the lower bound of middle class.
Ok then so uh…
https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentiles/
So the median household income is about $83k in 2025.
So, 2/3 of that is ~55k, 4/3 is ~111k.
Thats what Pew says the middle class is, just entirely based on taking the median and making a belt around it, not factoring in actual costs of anything at all.
This is basically completely useless, to define ‘middle class’ this way. Totally arbitrary, totally unrelated to actual lifestyle and things you have and can do.