Median family income over the past 70 years

I’m working on a piece about what’s happened to college tuition since the 1960s, which turns out to be a very counter-intuitive story for a variety of reasons, and in the course of doing so I’ve tracked the federal government’s calculation of median family income since the mid-1950s.

Note that this is median, not mean, income, so it doesn’t really capture what’s been happening to the top 5%/1%.1%/.01% etc. of the income distribution. Note also that family income is consistently about 20% higher than the more commonly quoted statistic of household income (Household income includes households of just one person. Families are people living together as a family unit).

Here are the stats, stated in constant C-CPI-U 2024 dollars.

Increase by decade

1955 -1964:   28.8%

42.3K to 54.6K

1965-1974:   22.5%

56.7K to 69.5K

1975-1984:   4.5%

68.2K to 71.3K

1985-1994:   5.4%

72.3K to 76.2K

1995-2004:  9.5%

77.9K to 85.3K

2005-2014:   -0.5%

86.2K to 85.8K

2015-2024:  16.2%

91.1K to 105.8K

Growth by 20-year increments

64% growth 1955-74

11.7% growth 1975-94

10.1% growth 1995-2014

Note that the current decade is quite an outlier in the context of the rest of the previous half-century, although Donnie from Queens is doing his best to fix that.

Anyway in its broad outline this story is well-known: Very rapid broad-based income growth in the 1950s and 1960s, with much slower growth since the mid-1970s, except at the top of the distribution, which again isn’t captured by medians. But I thought people might be interested in kicking around the numbers.