More Census data! This time it is the U.S. income distribution for 2005 showing the number of households up to $250,000. (I have since added more graphs that include incomes above $250,000: 2005 US Income Distribution Part 2 and 2005 US Income Distribution Part 3)
{Click on the graph to take a closer look}
While the original Census data can be found in U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey Table HINC-06. Income Distribution to $250,000 or More for Households I needed to calculate the number of households in $10,000 increments for this graph. (That calculation can be found here: Census household income distribution. Besides the income distribution for 2005, I added 2004 as a bonus. It can be viewed by anyone with a Google Account.)
See Also: 2005 US Income Distribution Part 2 and 2005 US Income Distribution Part 3 for graphs of the rich and super rich. And United States’ Average Income since 1913 both with and without capital gains.
Addendum:
11/19/2006 Added upper limits of income quintiles and the median from Table H-1. Income Limits for Each Fifth and Top 5 Percent of Households
[tags]US Income Distribution, Income Distribution, Census Income Distribution[/tags]
Visualizing Economics was created by 
View my LinkedIn Profile
Email me at
catherine[at]mrdiconsulting.com
Subscribe via RSS
Become a fan on Facebook
Follow me on Twitter
{ 5 trackbacks }
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
nice, but 2 ways to improve:
1) It would be helpful if you drew the vertical and labeled it – nobody wants to count those little houses and then multiply by 500K.
2) little houses should be drawn only on the graph, and where it explains that each house represents 500 k housholds.
Do not dra it next to total household count and next to count of households below 250k – it confuses the reader.
Now what would be really interesting is to get an income distribution change over time, like your average income over time graph.
Have you considered Ben Schneiderman’s (U of MD)
“Tree Maps?” It’s a way of plotting how much
of the pie each percentile gets. Hint, half of the graph is taken up by 1 percentile, and the other boxes are scrunched…
Im taking your data at face value but the graph on your other page showing average income to the early 1900s being over 10000 doesnt seem practically right. I graduated in 1977 with a degree and a cpa certificate and my annual salary was 15,000 Assuming your data is numerically correct, the top wage earners wouldnt seem to be enough to skew it so I suspect the denominator is suspect however defined
Nice graphs! I especially like the percentile scores at the bottom of the graph. Are you a fan of Edward Tufte?
Yes, I have Tufte’s books but I liked his presentation better. I think he is able to explain his ideas more clearly when he presents them himself.
Mark R: The dollars on the graph you refer to are 2004 dollars, meaning they are adjusted for inflation. They are probably correct. Your $15,000 1977 salary is much more than $15,000 in 2004 dollars.
Household income skews reality a little when people figure out that often “households” with only one person or wage earner in it make less than households with several.
Some of the smaller households are doing just as well per capita as those with twice as many people and twice the income.
The “income” above almost certainly include the value of government transfer payments, such as earned income credit, medicaid or medicare, food stamps, section 8 housing, etc.
The chart is less skewed, when we take income “after taxes” into account.
I meant to say the income noted above excluded the transfer payments.
I would really like to know how the $2,500 increment data was obtained for incomes above $100,000. Your Google spreadsheet mentions only the usual US census data as its source, but their data bins are $50,000 above $100,000. Did you have other sources?
Great graph. I’d love to use it in a statistics course I teach, but the font for the horizontal axis is too light. It’s not visible in Power Point. It would be great if all the labels were in darker fonts.
Thank you! I’m an economics layman and your graphs always address my curiosities clearly and concisely. Please keep up the good work!
I’d love to see a plot of household income for the entire world. We sometimes forget how lucky we are.
One thing to note, though, is that you are not including the very long tail that goes out on the high end. I know that this data is not included in the census, but I think the resulting chart is very misleading.
Fantastic Chart….I just wrote up a review for Robert Whapples course for the Teaching Company on Modern Economic Issues. I don’t give a hoot about minor fudges in your chart. Transefer payments and single incomes are a drop in the bucket. I want everyone to see the disaster we are in. Have you updated this for 2010? It’s like the census and statistics will not show the gross inequality of our country’s economy and how it’s getting worse…
I love the description called the L curve…..where 99 percent of us are on the base and 1 percent are on the upright….