You’ll need to earn close to $200,000 a year to be within the top 10% of U.S. household incomes, though the exact threshold depends on where you live.
A recent Visa analysis calculated the income and net worth households need to be considered “affluent” across the U.S., which the report defines as households in the top 10% in terms of either income or net worth. Visa based the thresholds on 2024 U.S. Census survey data.
Nationally, those thresholds are about $210,000 a year in income or a net worth of roughly $1.8 million. Net worth is a measure of a household’s total assets, including home equity, savings and investments, minus its debts.
Those thresholds have increased since 2020, when the income needed to reach the top 10% was about $170,000 and the wealth cutoff sat around $1.3 million nationally. Rising home values and stock prices have pushed both numbers higher, while wage growth added further momentum, the study says.
The analysis also looked at how these thresholds vary by region, using cost-of-living data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to account for local price differences. Here’s a look what it takes to be considered affluent in different parts of the country:
