August 13, 2026
The most important thing to understand about any income percentile — the ones on this site included — is what it deliberately leaves out. It ranks your income against other people's income. It does not know what your rent is, what your state takes in tax, or what a gallon of milk costs where you live.
That gap between "ranks well" and "feels well-off" is where most of the confusion about income statistics lives. Two households with identical incomes, one in Mississippi and one outside Washington, D.C., will get very similar national percentiles and lead very different financial lives.
Take a household earning $200,000 a year. Nationally, that's a strong position: 13.4% of US households report $200,000 or more, so this household sits comfortably inside the top 15% of the country.
Now put that household in Loudoun County, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs. Loudoun's median household income is $181,765, and 44.7% of households there earn at least $200,000.
The same $200,000 household is:
Nothing about their finances changed. Their national ranking says they're doing better than roughly six households in seven. Their local ranking says they're an ordinary household on their own street — and it's the local figure that determines what they'll pay for a house, what their neighbors' lifestyles look like, and what "normal" feels like day to day.
Run the same exercise in the other direction and it's just as stark. In Mississippi, only 5.8% of households reach $200,000. That same income is top-6% territory there. In D.C., 26.7% of households clear it — more than one in four. See the full state ranking for how wide that spread runs across all fifty states.
Three things separate a high income from a high standard of living, and none of them appear in a percentile.
Housing. This is the big one. Housing is the largest line item in most household budgets, and it varies between metro areas far more than incomes do. A local labor market that pays 40% above the national median can easily sit in a housing market that costs multiples of the national norm. When housing eats a disproportionate share of gross income, everything downstream — saving, childcare, retirement contributions — competes for a much smaller remainder. Two households at the same income with very different housing burdens are not in the same financial position, and no income statistic will tell you which is which.
State and local taxes. Every figure on this site, and in the Census tables behind it, is pre-tax income. But the US doesn't tax income uniformly by geography. A handful of states — Texas, Florida, Washington, and Nevada among them — levy no personal income tax at all, while others apply progressive state rates on top of federal ones. Local income taxes exist in some cities and not others. Two households with identical gross income and identical percentiles can end up with materially different take-home pay purely because of where they filed. States without an income tax typically raise revenue elsewhere, through property or sales taxes, so the comparison is rarely as simple as "no income tax means more money" — but it's never nothing, either.
Everything else that's priced locally. Childcare, insurance, transportation, utilities. These don't move in lockstep with local wages, and they're not captured anywhere in a household income figure.
Given all that, the national percentile is the less informative of the two numbers this site gives you.
Your local percentile — county, and where available, town — is measured against households facing broadly the same housing market, the same state tax code, and the same local prices as you. It won't correct for cost of living, because it isn't a cost-of-living adjustment. But it does compare you to people whose costs resemble yours, which is a rough and useful proxy for the same thing.
This is exactly why the site drills down from national to state to county to town rather than stopping at one number. The Loudoun County page, for instance, shows what a national top-15% income looks like against local reality — and every one of the 3,000-plus counties has the same breakdown.
A few rules that keep percentiles useful rather than misleading:
Read both numbers, not one. If your national and local percentiles are far apart, that gap is itself the finding. A wide gap in the "nationally higher" direction means you live somewhere with a comparatively low local income base; the opposite means you're in a high-cost, high-income area where your ranking is diluted by well-paid neighbors.
Don't treat a strong percentile as proof you're fine. Ranking in the top 20% while spending most of your income on housing is a real and common situation. The percentile is describing your position in a distribution, not auditing your budget.
Don't treat a weak percentile as proof you're behind. A mid-range national ranking in a low-cost county can support a more comfortable life than a strong ranking in an expensive metro. If you're weighing a move, the question worth asking isn't "what percentile does this salary put me in" but "what does this salary buy in that specific place" — and the local median on each county page is a far better starting point for that than any national figure.
Remember these are pre-tax figures. Every number here, everywhere on this site, is gross household income as the Census collects it.
Want to see how far apart your national and local rankings actually are? Check both at once.
So — what's your income percentile?
Enter your gender, marital status, and income, then pick your state and county — takes about 30 seconds.
Check now