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13% Make Over $100k in 2008

A $100k salary is not what it used to be.

  • In 1984, a $100k salary put you in the top 1% of the workforce.
  • In 2008, a $100k salary put you in the top 13%.

Here are where the data comes from: On July 8, 2008 the Tax Foundation published the latest federal individual income tax data as reported by the IRS for the years 1980 thru 2006. We used these data to estimate the numbers for 2008, and to estimate how many earned more than $100,000. Here's a summary from their Table 7 - "Dollar Cut-Off, 1980-2006 (Minimum AGI for tax return to fall into various percentiles)" along with our estimates (an extrapolation of the data) for the year 2008:

  1% 5% 10% 13% 25% 50%
Act. 1984 $100,889 $55,423 $43,956   $29,360 $15,998
Act. 1996 $227,546 $101,141 $74,986   $45,757 $23,174
Act. 2005 $364,657 $145,283 $103,912   $62,068 $30,881
Est. 2008 $362,000 $156,000 $112,000 $100,000 $66,000 $33,000

How the data plotted for 2008

1% of the workforce makes over $362,000  
2% of the workforce makes over $255,000 (Close to the Obama $250k benchmark)
3% of the workforce makes over $205,000  
5% of the workforce makes over $156,000  
10% of the workforce makes over $112,000  
13% of the workforce makes over $100,000 (The traditional $100k benchmark)