this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Data is Beautiful
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Did they use data from 20 years ago?
No way this is even close to being accurate.
Unless they changed the definition of middle class to, "make enough money to afford rent and nothing else."
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.
Minimum to qualify. The data from SmartAsset is labeled as "lower bound for middle class income".
Lower bound, middle, upward bound, I don't give a shit what fucking name they gave it. It's still worthless bullshit.
There is NO FUCKING WAY that a household making that income would have any lifestyle traditionally associated with "middle class".
I don't know if you're smoking pot or a Republican apologist trying to make the economy sound better than it is, but using their qualifier as somehow defending the obvious nonsense this dataset is, is absurd.