According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Home Ownership Affordability Monitor, the national median household income was $85,828 in March 2026. This figure compares with Motio Research's estimate of $88,310 and our estimate of $87,164 for that month.
But when you drill down into smaller regions within the U.S., such as the metropolitan areas surrounding the nation's largest cities, the median household income for each can vary quite a lot from the figure that applies for the national population. Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, Niccolo Conte, and Miranda Smith dug into the median household income data for the fifty largest metropolitan areas to create the following infographic:
By definition, median household income is the amount of total money income earned by a household that falls in the exact middle of a given population's income spectrum. Half of the households within that population will have a higher income, half will have a lower income.
With that definition in mind, the three metropolitan areas with the highest median household incomes are:
- San Jose, California: $175,491
- San Francisco, California: $141,277
- Washington, DC: $130,587
The three major metropolitan areas with the lowest median household incomes are:
- Buffalo, New York: $74,258
- Memphis, Tennessee: $70,056
- New Orleans, Louisiana: $65,021
San Jose is the only major metropolitan area of the U.S. with a median household income that is double the U.S. national median household income.
If you're a World Cup fan reading this article from outside the U.S. and wonder how your nation's median household income compares to those in the U.S., you might try using this tool or others similar to it to convert the U.S. median household incomes by city into your national currency after adjusting for their relative purchasing power. For example, the gross "equivalised" median household income in the United Kingdom in 2023/24 for all households was £44,300 (see Table 20a in this spreadsheet from the UK's Office of National Statistics), which would convert to about $61,357 in U.S. dollars in 2026 and puts the UK's median household income below that of New Orleans.
Image credit: Mapped: How Household Income Varies Across Major U.S. Metros by Gabriel Cohen, Niccolo Conte, and Miranda Smith. Visual Capitalist. 10 June 2026.
Labels: data visualization, demographics, median household income
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