Here’s How Much Income Puts You in Philadelphia’s Top 1 Percent

Photo by Jeff Fusco

The gap between the country’s top earners and everyone else is, unsurprisingly, still widening, and a report from CNBC this week gives us some insight into what that gap looks like in the country’s 25 largest metro areas. Philly is on the list, and let’s just say the threshold for the city’s 1 percent club ain’t low.

For the Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington metro, the annual income required to be in the top one percent is a whopping $489,305, and the average annual income of the top one percent in Philadelphia stands at $1,145,336.

Philly’s threshold for the top one percent is even higher than the national average of $389,436, and not far off from the average income of $1.15 million for the bunch nationwide. (For further comparison, Boston’s entry point is $701,776, DC’s $575,237, and New York’s $672,795.)

So how extreme is Philly’s income gap? Pew’s latest State of the City report has Philadelphia’s median household income at $41,233, with 44 percent of Philadelphia households having an annual income of less than $35,000.

While Philly is often associated with these weighty poverty stats (we’re consistently identified as the big city with the highest poverty rate), as a New York Times column argued this week, some people should stop pretending they’re not rich.

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