Research from the American Enterprise Institute says the american middle class has shifted enough that upper middle class households are now the largest income group in the U.S. About 31% of U.S. households fit that category, according to the report.
The analysis used U.S. Census data and family incomes from 1979 through 2024. Scott Winship, a co-author of the report and a senior fellow at AEI, said the change reflects broad gains across the distribution rather than a fixed-income squeeze on a single group.
AEI Income Brackets
AEI defines upper middle class households as those earning between $153,864 and $461,592 for a family of four. The report says that share is roughly three times larger than it was in 1979, while the share of rich households is 3.7% of the nation's households, about 12 times higher than in 1979.
The report also says the share of Americans in the core middle class and low middle class has declined since 1979. That leaves the upper middle class as the largest economic group in the U.S., even as the study describes a shrinking middle class overall.
Scott Winship on Income Gains
Winship said, "The whole distribution of Americans, from poor to rich, has done better over time. And to the extent that fewer people are within a fixed income range that we might think of as middle class, that's just because everybody's gotten richer over time." He also said, "The additional opportunities that women have are a big part of the story."
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He linked part of that shift to household choices, saying, "People have chosen to work more and afford more things, rather than, say, have more children or have a sort of traditional sole breadwinner, but then have less money to buy things."
Women, Work, and Spending
The report says income gains over several decades were fueled by an increase in dual-earner families and professional gains for women. It cites Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing that about 11% of women had college degrees in 1970, compared with about 40% of American women today.
Winship said those changes also show up in how households describe their own finances. "When you ask people about their own families, their own personal financial situation, you get much, much larger shares of people who say that they're doing fairly well," he said.
The article tied the shift to consumer demand moving toward higher-end goods and services, while noting that housing, education, and health care costs have outpaced inflation. A recent CBS News poll found that a majority of respondents said it is harder today to buy a house, get a good job, or raise a family than it was for previous generations.
For readers tracking where they sit in the income distribution, the report's threshold is the practical marker: a family of four earning at least $153,864 falls into AEI's upper middle class band, and the study places that group at 31% of U.S. households.
