Distribution of Personal Income

Distribution of U.S. Personal Income

The December 2024 distribution of personal income release revises all previous years and provides provisional data for 2023. Estimates for 2022 are available as a separate file, consistent with previous releases. Estimates for 2000-2023 are available in a pooled summary file. Given the importance of providing timely data, extrapolations were made for several income sources with unavailable data to provide distributional estimates for 2023 (provisional summary file). Because the top 1 percent and top 5 percent income shares are substantially influenced by not-yet-available Statistics of Income source data for 2023, interval ranges are provided for these estimates.

• Growth Incidence Curve

  The growth incidence curve (GIC) provides information about the evolution of income over a certain period of time. An upward sloping GIC indicates that lower income households experienced slower growth than higher income households, while a downward sloping GIC indicates that lower income households experienced faster growth than higher income households. The GIC supplements other measures such as the Gini coefficient or the shares of personal income going to different deciles. The GIC below for the time period 2000–2023 shows that households in the bottom of the income distribution experienced faster rates of real personal income growth than those in the top of the income distribution, on average. For more information on GICs and analysis using the December 2024 distribution of personal income release, please refer to Distribution of U.S. Personal Income–Growth Incidence Curves.

  

Distribution of State Personal Income

Prototype statistics showing how personal income is distributed across households in each state and the District of Columbia were updated in July 2025; this release also contains new statistics showing how disposable personal income (personal income after taxes) is distributed across households in each state. The release added new statistics for 2023 and updated the entire series from 2012 to 2022 based on new source data and updates in methods. These statistics build on the methodology BEA uses to estimate the national distribution of personal income. They are consistent with and complement existing BEA data on state personal income totals. Data users are invited to provide feedback on these prototype state statistics as we continue to research and make improvements.

Internationally Comparable Statistics

An updated series of internationally comparable research statistics has been provided for the same years (2000-2022 + provisional 2023) that follow the guidance of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Expert Group on Disparities in a National Accounts framework (EG DNA). Following the same structure as the BEA distribution of personal income tables, this release includes separate file estimates for 2022 and 2023, and summary table for 2000-2023. These tables (and accompanying methodology document) are provided in the "Internationally Comparable Statistics" section on this page.

Distribution of Personal Saving (Based on Joint Distribution of Disposable Personal Income and Personal Consumption Expenditures)

To provide a fuller picture of the well-being of households, BEA and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) have collaborated to produce a distribution of personal saving, by developing a joint distribution of disposable personal income (DPI) and personal consumption expenditures (PCE). This project is based on the independent DPI and PCE distributions constructed by BEA and BLS, respectively. This is an ongoing research project, with the joint distribution estimates and methodology available in the "Distribution of Personal Saving" section on this page, and the latest independent PCE results on the Distribution of Personal Consumption Expenditures BLS page.

Last updated July 2024; does not reflect the revised distributional estimates released Dec. 10, 2024.