What goes into your comparison.
Keeping Up is published by the team behind Uncle. Our benchmarks provide context about groups of people, not a judgment about your financial life.
Income: local survey observations.
Income benchmarks use weighted 2024 ACS public-use microdata, adjusted to 2025 dollars using CPI. Total annual personal income includes more than salary. Metro estimates allocate PUMA observations using population crosswalks; they describe metro areas, not city limits.
Wealth: a modeled local estimate.
Net worth means assets minus debts, including retirement accounts and home equity. We reweight national Survey of Consumer Finances family wealth distributions to the local ACS income mix within age and household groups, then average quantiles across five survey implicates. The source manifest labels the SCF inputs as 2025. This is not a direct survey of wealth in each metro, and local housing prices are not directly observed in the model.
Who is included?
Single adults head a household without a resident spouse or partner. Couples combine the householder and resident spouse or partner and use the older partner's age. Other household members' income is excluded. Both groups can have children. SCF wealth describes a family economic unit; it is not individually attributed wealth. These are not all workers or all family types.
National age context.
National wealth pages include all family types and use the reference person's age. The age-30 page pools ages 28–32; the other general age pages use exact ages. Couples pages select families with a resident spouse or partner and pool five years centered on the named age, using the older partner's age to match the calculator. They show weighted means and medians averaged across all five implicates, with the number of sampled families disclosed. Counts are not multiplied by five. Pooling improves sample support but does not remove survey uncertainty; pooled results are not exact-age benchmarks. The national income-at-30 page uses ACS person weights for all adults aged 30, including zero income, and is not restricted to householders. These national populations differ from the local single-adult cohorts.
Age bands, medians and missing data.
Benchmarks use seven age bands: 18–24, 25–34, 35–44, 45–54, 55–64, 65–74 and 75+. Local benchmarks do not estimate exact-age figures. A median is the 50th percentile, not an arithmetic average. Income cells with fewer than 100 sample observations are withheld. Wealth requires at least 75 families in every survey implicate and sufficient support for income-bin reweighting. Unsupported cells remain unavailable; we never substitute national figures.
Why can two metros have the same median?
Income percentiles are weighted inverse empirical CDFs: we sort adjusted dollar incomes and select the first observation whose cumulative weight reaches the requested percentile. We do not convert incomes into bracket midpoints or interpolate between observations. Repeated reported dollar amounts can therefore produce identical medians in different metros; CPI adjustment and rounding to whole dollars do not make them unique. Chicago and Minneapolis–St. Paul both select the same adjusted income amount at the 25–34 single-adult median. Their other percentiles and survey weights differ. Census disclosure protections, including top-coding of high incomes, also limit precision, especially for top-1% thresholds.
How to read the numbers.
Percentiles describe how a comparison group is distributed. Different age bands contain different people, so differences do not forecast an individual's progress. Survey and model uncertainty is larger in small groups and distribution tails. We do not publish confidence intervals. Income rank does not establish affordability, and wealth rank does not describe available cash or a suitable financial plan.
Version and updates.
Dataset: acs2024-scf2025-v1. Dollar year: 2025. The visible updated date records a content update; it does not mean a new survey was released. Numbers are rendered directly into the page HTML using the same dataset as the calculator.
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Explore estimated wealth benchmarks →