One needs an income three times over the California value to even have a chance at owning a home. How is barely being able to afford a shitty one bedroom apartment in the state considered middle class?
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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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.
As someone who lives in Portland and makes that amount, I can tell you that you cannot live in the city on that paycheck and consider yourself "middle class."
I make about double that as a single person in Portland and cannot comprehend how anyone buys a home here. I still live in 400 sq ft apt because I can't bring myself to pay any more for rent and can't ever seem to sock enough money away for the ever inflating housing market to actually buy a home. All while my parents ask you're almost 40 why don't you own a house yet. Because when you were my age making 50k each you could buy a 100k home. Even if I had a partner making 100k, there are no 200k houses to buy. Best you can get is around 400k with plenty of compromises and I just can't swing paying a mortgage that is more than double my rent plus all the utilities that are currently lumped into my rent.
So yeah idk how 58k can be Oregon middle class when you cannot afford a house on that with any fincial safety.
Yeah the data is wrong. Live in Oklahoma combine me and my wife our income probably more than that and we are poor. And we live in a small town, that simi affordable to live in.
Doing this by state kinda makes it useless given that the real distinction is urban-rural.
Too bad we haven't invented more than yellow and brown.
this chart smells like a public park restroom
upper norcal is around 87.5k in around san jose. the lower cost states also correlates the LACK OF JOB prospects there too.
Are those 90s wages? This isn't even middle class in Europe.
Kind of a useless graph. Separate out the big cities from the rest of the state and now we're talking.
Is this for a single person?
Household
this is poverty
What is middle class anymore?
Same map as the life expectancy one you just posted. Gotta love all that freedom /s
Damn, of all the things Massachusetts is number one in ….