This page contains a full-time individual income percentile calculator for the United States in 2017. Data originates from the March ASEC and includes full-time incomes earned between January and December 2016. To avoid any controversy, you can select whether the tool defines a full-time worker as 30+ or 40+ hours worked in a typical week.
Also on this site: our income bracket article for all workers. Also try the individual income by age calculator and the income by household calculator. For net worth , we have a net worth percentile by age calculator and the standard net worth bracket calculator.
Building the Full-Time Worker Income Calculator
We have now built this full-time individual income percentile calculator two years running (see the 2016 version). It eliminates some confounding variables from our generic worker data, such as part-time work and other non traditional working situations. The IPUMS-CPS variable UHRSWORKT allows us to screen worked by the number of hours they usually work to attempt to give some numbers for fulltime workers.
How Do You Define Full-Time Workers in America?
Traditionally, working a 40 hour workweek is the defacto standard to be a full-time worker. However, as implied by the 'defacto', this number actually isn't enshrined in any federal law. Still, as that is probably the most common definition of 'full-time' most readers will have, we used it as one of our screens.
The 30 hour workweek is enshrined in at least one federal law - the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also commonly called Obamacare. That law states that an average of 30 hours a week and 130 hours per month counts as full-time. While we can't help with the monthly hour screen, we left 30+ in the tool for you.
Source and Methodology on the Full-Time Worker Income Calculator
As with the individual income percentile calculator and the income bracket calculator, the calculator comes from the harmonized microdata from the excellent Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota. We only use 'Usual Hours Worked Per Week', UHRSWORKT, as a screen unlike the other ASEC income posts. Note that the HOURS variables have changed since last year; this calculator is not perfectly comparable.
Sarah Flood, Miriam King, Steven Ruggles, and J. Robert Warren. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 4.0. [dataset]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2015. http://doi.org/10.18128/D030.V4.0.
Dataset Size and Quality for the Fulltime Individual Income Calculator
- Datapoints: 69,562 (30+ hours), 61,209 (40+ hours)
- Population estimate: 123,730,263 fulltime workers (30+ hours), 108,795,029 fulltime workers (40+ hours)
Anything Interesting in the Full-Time Individual Income Calculator?
Where does your full-time income rank?
In one sense, especially knowing the demographics of you readers, this is a more important tool than the income percentile calculator. Most DQYDJ readers have a full-time day job and work 30, 40, or more hours per week. By screening out part-time work and other casual working situations, a tool like this is better suited for most of our readers.
Here's how it breaks down, in income bracket form. (Again, see our income bracket article for more).
- All US Workers
- Median Income: $37,610.00
- 90% Income: $108,033.00
- 30+ Hours a Week
- Median Income: $45,000.00
- 90% Income: $120,000.00
- 40+ Hours a Week
- Median Income: $47,346.00
- 90% Income: $123,412.00
As you certainly would expect, screening for hours worked makes a significant difference to all of the cutoffs. There's over a $15,000 delta in 90th percentile income breakpoints between the full set and the 40+ hour full-time worker set.
