How much did household income grow over the years – and how did it change distributionally? Below is a tool to compare real household income growth in the United States across percentiles for any chosen period from 1968 to 2026.
Household income growth by percentile calculator
Using the household income growth tool
The tool defaults to comparing two 20-year periods. Pick any start and end years for each period, then hit Compare Periods to see growth at each percentile.
Basic comparison
- Period 1 and Period 2: Select start and end years for two time periods to compare side-by-side
- Chart: See annualized real income growth for each percentile in both periods
- Summary: Highlights median growth and top percentile growth for quick comparison
Options and presets
Click Options to access additional features:
- Presets: Quick access to notable comparisons – last 20 vs prior 20 years, a Leonhardt-esque comparison (1968–1980 vs 1980–2014, closest we can get with the dataset), first vs second half of the data, and pre/post-2000
- Single period mode: Analyze just one time period instead of comparing two
- Show all percentiles: Display every percentile (1–99) instead of the default selection. (Before 1996, the tool stops at the 95th percentile due to aggressive topcoding.)
Reading the results
The chart shows annualized real growth – the compound annual rate of household income growth, adjusted for inflation. A flat line means all income levels grew at the same rate while a line sloping up and to the right means higher-earning households gained more.
Click Detailed Table to see both total and annualized growth for key percentiles.
The composition problem
One thing to realize here: household composition changed dramatically over the period represented in the dataset.
A 1968 household typically had 3+ people, was more likely to have a single breadwinner, and often included multiple children. A household today is more likely to be a dual-earner couple with one kid, a single person living alone, or a multi-generational arrangement. Comparing "household income" across these eras can be like comparing apples to oranges.
(Well, at least they're both fruit! 🍎🍊)
The rise of multi-earner households
The biggest compositional shift: dual-earner married couples have risen over the years, from about 47% of working married couples in 1967 to 66% by 2008, peaking near 70% in the mid-to-late 1990s. This shift was largely complete by the late 1980s – but its effects on household income statistics have stuck.
Women's labor force participation drove a lot of this change, rising from around 41–42% in 1968 to roughly 60% by 2000. But multi-earner households can also mean adult children living at home and working, multi-generational households, or any other combination of earners living under one roof.
A married-couple household is more likely to have two earners today than in 1968. When you see "household income grew 50%," part of that is actual wage growth – but part of it is just more people working per household.
Think about it this way: if two spouses work 40-hour weeks and household income doubled from when one spouse worked 40-hour weeks... did anyone actually make more income per hour worked? The individual income tool strips out this effect – check both if you want the full picture.
Households got smaller
Average household size fell from 3.14 people in 1970 to 2.50 in 2025. Same income, fewer mouths to feed – that's a higher standard of living that raw household income doesn't capture.
This cuts both ways, so economists disagree about what it means. Scott Winship argues that because households got smaller, raw income numbers actually understate gains in per-person living standards – adjusting for household size, median income rose quite a bit since the 1960s.
On the negative side, Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies has documented that rising housing costs correlate with lower fertility – smaller households partly reflect people who can't afford to start families, not just lifestyle preferences. A 2025 working paper by Benjamin Couillard claimed that rising housing costs since 1990 account for 11% fewer children and about half (51%) of the TFR decline between the 2000s and 2010s.
Another major factor driving down household size: more people living alone. Single-person households have more than doubled as a share of all households since 1960. Later marriages, higher divorce rates, and longer life expectancies mean more Americans are maintaining their own independent households on a single income.
You can see information on rising home prices and home affordability right here on DQYDJ.
Assortative mating: power couples
Here's a wrinkle that increases household inequality even when individual inequality stays flat: high earners increasingly marry high earners.
In 1970, only 13% of young men in the top earning decile married young women in the top decile. By 2017, that figure had more than doubled to almost 29%. NBER research originally estimated that if 2005 marriages had been random (instead of assortative), the Gini coefficient would have fallen from 0.43 to 0.34. The authors later corrected that to 0.43 to 0.42 – sorting by itself has a small effect. In their corrected numbers, the rise in single (unmarried) households matters more: moving from 1960's share of singles to 2005's, the Gini rises from 0.34 to 0.38.
Other research has extended this finding. Fagereng, Guiso, and Pistaferri (2022) used Norwegian data to find that people also sort on returns to wealth – not just how much money they have, but how well they grow said wealth. In top-decile households, the spouse with superior pre-marriage investment returns tends to manage nearly all household assets, accelerating wealth concentration at the top.
So when you see top household incomes pulling away, part of that may be "power couples" – two high earners combining forces into one household... the proverbial pair of 90+ percentile earners combining to create a 99th percentile household. But research points to another possibility: household composition, and specifically the rising share of single (unmarried) households.
Methodology and data notes
The calculator uses household income data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC), accessed via IPUMS CPS.
- Income measure: Total household income before taxes, the HHINCOME variable. This excludes capital gains – one-time profits from selling stocks or property aren't included. Inflation adjustments use chained CPI-U from 2000+, R-CPI-U-RS from 1978 to 1999, and the CPI-U-X1 before that... the preferred adjustment methodology of the Census Bureau.
- Topcoding: Pre-1996 data is capped at the 95th percentile due to aggressive topcoding practices in use at the time. Post-1996 data extends to the 99th percentile. Top percentiles have a break in 2011, when the Census Bureau switched to rank proximity swapping. Treat top-percentile comparisons across 2011 with caution.
- Population: Every household in the survey, weighted by household weight.
- Years: Years are survey years – incomes are earned in the calendar year before the survey, so 2026 numbers are income earned in 2025. Other sources label it by the year the income was earned.
- 2014 redesign: Census revised its income questions in the 2014 survey to pick up more retirement income sources.
- No equivalence scaling: Raw household income, not adjusted for household size or composition. (See the rest of the post for why that matters!)
As with the individual tool, this data isn't longitudinal – we're comparing "the median household in 1980" to "the median household in 2014," not tracking the same households over time. People move up and down the distribution throughout their lives, and – as I've taken pains to point out – the composition of households changes.
Related income tools
Explore more income statistics and calculators:
- Individual Income Growth by Percentile – Same analysis for individual income, without the household composition effects. ("Drop the 'Household'. It's cleaner.")
- Household Income by Year – Average, median, and percentiles for the whole dataset
- Household Income Percentile Calculator – See where your household ranks in the current year
- Household Income Percentiles – Full breakdown of the most recent year's distribution
- Individual Income by Year – For comparison without household effects
Household income growth is real, but it's a messier story than the individual one. More earners per household, smaller households, power couples at the top... when you compare 1970 to today, you're also comparing different ways of organizing economic life.
Keep that in mind as you explore – and try the individual income percentile growth tool for an isolated comparison!
