Median income

Macroeconomic indicator

The median income is the income amount that divides a population into two equally-sized groups, half having an income above that amount, and half having an income below that amount. It may differ from the mean (or average) income. Both of these are ways of understanding income distribution.

Median income can be calculated by household income, by personal income, or for specific demographic groups.

The measurement of income from individuals and households, which is necessary to produce statistics such as the median, can pose challenges and yield results inconsistent with aggregate national accounts data. For example, an academic study on the Census income data claims that when correcting for underreporting, U.S. median gross household income was 15% higher in 2010 (table 3).^[1]

Median equivalised income

Household incomes are sometimes adjusted by a factor that takes into account household size (and possibly composition). In that case, the adjusted, or "equivalised," income is assigned to each member of the household before statistics such as the median are computed at the individual level.^[2]^[3]

The following table represents data from OECD's "median disposable income per person" metric; disposable income deducts from gross income the value of taxes on income and wealth paid and of contributions paid by households to public social security schemes.^[4] The figures are equivalised by dividing income by the square root of household size. As OECD displays median disposable incomes in each country's respective currency, the values were converted here using PPP conversion factors for private consumption from the same source, accounting for each country's cost of living in the year that the disposable median income was recorded.^[5] Data are in United States dollars at current prices and current purchasing power parity for private consumption for the reference year.

	Country	Median income (US$, PPP)	Year
1	Luxembourg	47,568	2020
2	United States	46,625	2021
3	Norway	41,621	2021
4	Switzerland	39,264	2019
5	Canada	38,582	2020
6	Austria	36,992	2020
7	Netherlands	35,891	2021
8	Australia	35,518	2020
9	Belgium	35,153	2020
10	Iceland	34,316	2017
11	Denmark	33,569	2019
12	Sweden	33,472	2021
13	Germany	33,288	2019
14	New Zealand	31,752	2020
15	Ireland	30,818	2020
16	Finland	30,727	2021
17	South Korea	30,526	2020
18	France	29,131	2019
19	Slovenia	27,519	2020
20	Italy	26,713	2020
21	United Kingdom	25,383	2020
22	Spain	25,288	2020
23	Estonia	23,660	2020
24	Poland	21,904	2020
25	Japan	21,694	2018
26	Czech Republic	21,063	2020
27	Lithuania	21,034	2020
28	Israel	20,833	2020
29	Portugal	19,347	2020
30	Latvia	18,665	2020
31	Croatia	18,607	2020
32	Hungary	17,584	2020
33	Slovak Republic	16,409	2020
34	Russia	16,163	2017
35	Romania	15,897	2020
36	Greece	15,501	2020
37	Bulgaria	14,661	2020
38	Turkey	11,242	2019
39	Chile	10,058	2020
40	Costa Rica	8,915	2021
41	Brazil	6,942	2020
42	Mexico	5,930	2020
43	South Africa	5,489	2020
44	China	4,484	2021
45	India	2,473	2021

References

^ Fixler, Dennis; Johnson, David S. (September 30, 2012). Accounting for the Distribution of Income in the U.S. National Accounts (PDF). NBER Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. Archived from the original (PDF) on January 22, 2020.
^ "Terms of Reference, OECD Project on the Distribution of Household Incomes" (PDF). July 2017. Retrieved 6 January 2024.
^ "Glossary: Equivalised disposable income". Retrieved 6 January 2024.
^ Income Distribution Database OECD June 2023, retrieved 1 September 2023
^ "Income Distribution Database".

Economic classification of countries

Three-World Model

Gross domestic product (GDP)

Nominal	By country past and projected per capita per capita
Purchasing power parity (PPP)	By country future estimates per capita per capita per person employed

Gross national income (GNI)

Nominal per capita
PPP per capita

Wages

Wealth

Other national accounts

Human development

Digital divide

Net international
investment position (NIIP)

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