40% of Australians consider themselves to be middle class. This statistic is a telling indication of the state of the Australian middle class.
Where's the middle of the income distribution? According to the ATO, if you earned between $59,538 and $60,432 you're right in the middle.
Average Australian Salaries in 2023
A taxable income that was $131,501 or higher was within the top 10% of earners in Australia last year. About 5% of taxpayers had incomes above $180,000. Someone who earned more than $253,066 was in the top 1%.
Australians wanting to be in the country's top 1% for wealth need to have an individual net worth of US$5.5 million ($8.3 million), Knight Frank's 2023 Wealth Report has found.
The latest data from 2021 shows the share of the population in the middle class continues to hover around 50%, around where it has been since 2011. Prior to that year, the share of middle class Americans had been consistently shrinking since a peak of 61% in 1971.
Lower-income class refers to households with income below 75% of the median national income. Middle-income class refers to households with income between 75% and 200% of the median national income.
The Pew Research Center defines the middle class as households that earn between two-thirds and double the median U.S. household income, which was $65,000 in 2021, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.21 Using Pew's yardstick, middle income is made up of people who make between $43,350 and $130,000.7 This is a ...
So if you're on $100k or more, congratulations, you're in the top 20% of Aussie income earners. If not, don't worry, you're in the good company of 80% of Aussies.
More Coverage. The eye-watering wealth on display in the report is a stark difference to most Australians' perception of what it takes to be considered rich. The Finder survey which asked 1000 people what it took to be rich and found that earning $336,516 per year was the magic number.
The average earnings of the top 20% are 12x the average earnings of the bottom 20% and the wealth of the average household in the top 20% is 93x the average wealth of those in the bottom 20%. The average household gross income is $121,108, however the top 20% of households earn 48% of all income.
$100,000/year is above an average salary and if you're frugal enough, on $100,000/year, you should be able to live a good life and save some money too. Usually if you consider living in desirable locations of cities like Melbourne and Sydney, most of your income will be consumed in the house rents.
People in the census's very top income bracket, like you, earn at least $156,000 a year — or $3,000 a week — before tax. At census time, there were about 596,531 people in Australia above that income level — or 3.8 per cent of income earners.
There is no “one size fits all” plan for all but it is understood that an individual may need approximately $20,000 each year and an average family needs more than $50,000 a year to get by in Australia.
You receive LMITO if your taxable income is less than $126,000. You must also be an Australian resident for tax purposes. You will not receive it if your taxable income is $126,000 or more. We will work out your offsets and reduce your tax payable by this amount.
The average Australian would need to earn over $300,000 a year to consider themselves as officially "rich", new research has found.
Wealthy Individuals within Australia are generally deemed to be those with net investible assets (NIA) over $1M (or net of over $2.5M including the family home) and earning more than $250,000 per annum. Having said this, the ATO categorise 'Wealthy Individuals' as those who control a net wealth of $5M or more.
The top 10% of Aussie earners make $122,664 or more, Knight Frank's latest wealth report for 2023 shows. This, therefore, puts financial advisors ($155,882), engineering managers ($161,514) and even school principals ($130,142) among the top-earning professions.
A six-figure salary can come by digging a hole, filling a hole and calculating the depth of a hole, but the pursuit of $100,000 a year or more is not an exact science. Almost 790,000 Australians, or 6 per cent of the workforce, earned $100,000 or more in the past financial year, Australian Taxation Office figures show.
Only 9,144 of the 14,467 Australians on taxable incomes of more than $1 million worked. Only 17,883 of the 222,813 Australians on more than $250,000 worked.
Journalists often use this threshold as shorthand for 'high income'. But it may surprise you to know that just 3.1 per cent of Australian taxpayers had taxable incomes that high in 2016-17, the latest year for which figures are available. Only another 14.9 per cent had taxable incomes exceeding $80,000 a year.
Middle class families tend to own their own home (although with a mortgage), own a car (although with a loan or lease), send their kids to college (although with student loans or scholarships), are saving for retirement, and have enough disposable savings to afford certain luxuries like dining out and vacations.
Many have graduate degrees with educational attainment serving as the main distinguishing feature of this class. Household incomes commonly exceed $100,000, with some smaller one-income earners household having incomes in the high 5-figure range. "The upper middle class has grown...and its composition has changed.
Gallup has, for a number of years, asked Americans to place themselves -- without any guidance -- into five social classes: upper, upper-middle, middle, working and lower.