TrenderX: Income Percentile by City Calculator for 2018

Below is an individual income percentile by city calculator and a household income percentile by city calculator for 2018 in the United States. Enter a pre-tax household or individual income earned between January and December 2017 to compare with any metro area in the United States.

Need aggregated data? See the individual income percentile calculator or household income percentile calculator.

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Source and Methodology on the 2018 Income Percentile by City Calculator

Our source for the income percentile by city calculator was IPUMS-CPS:

Sarah Flood, Miriam King, Renae Rodgers, Steven Ruggles, and J. Robert Warren. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 6.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2018. http://bit.ly/2DfCF8M

See the individual income bracket article for details on the filter for workers. There is no corresponding filter for households, all households per city make the screen for that selection.

A city in our income definition is a metropolitan area defined by IPUMS.
Income is all sources of income, not only salary or wages. This includes business income, investment income, and all sources listed here.
Weighted mean standard error is defined as the weighted mean of samples from a metro area divided by the number of unweighted samples from that metro in the public dataset. This methodology matches Berkeley SDA’s. You can see the raw number of data points or samples for each city in the data tables.To be absolutely clear: weighted mean standard error’s an approximation. Not only is the measure controversial, but the Census Bureau makes those exact numbers impossible to calculate due to anonymization methods such as topcoding. We include standard errors due to popular demand – not because we are fans.
Regardless, low sample sizes and large standard errors mean you need to be skeptical of the data for smaller cities. E.g.: we doubt it’s more lucrative to live in Barnstable, MA than in San Jose, CA. Cape Cod (Barnstable counts, it’s past the bridge!) is an great place but can’t compete with the salaries in Silicon Valley.

In the calculator and tables data for some city income percentiles are ‘missing’. In the tables, we required a minimum of 250 households and 300 individuals to show centiles. In the calculator, we added centiles for cities which met either criteria. The calculator should automatically adjust to deciles if you add a metro area with fewer data points.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t include the metro area warning directly from the census bureau:

“One set of estimates that can be produced from CPS microdata files should be treated with caution. These are estimates for individual metropolitan areas. Although estimates for the larger areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and so forth, should be fairly accurate and valid for a multitude of uses, estimates for the smaller metropolitan areas (those with populations under 500,000) should be used with caution because of the relatively large sampling variability associated with these estimates.”

We’ve included population in both household and individual income by city tables for you to take a look.

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