How Much Money You Need to Make to be “Middle Class” in Big Cities in America

Everyone has their definition of what “middle-class” is, but someone has sat down and crunched the numbers for the 30 most populous cities in the United States.

NPR sat down and used the family income data from the 2013 American Community Survey, which counts only families, being defined as households with two or more people related by birth, marriage, or adoption.

For the 30 cities as a whole, the median family makes around $64,000, but at the high end of the spectrum, the average family makes $103,000 in the San Jose area which includes the heart of Silicon Valley, and at the low end of the spectrum, the median income in Detroit sits at about $30,000.

See the chart compiled by NPR below:

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