The American middle class has been shrinking for decades as the shares of rich households and poor households have grown. But some parts of the country have retained their middle-class residents far more than others.
A new study shows nowhere in the U.S. has a stronger middle class than Washington’s state capital.
In the Olympia metro area, which includes all of Thurston County, 66% of adults lived in a middle-class household in 2022, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. That ranks Olympia No. 1 among 254 U.S. metro areas for the share of people living in middle-class households.
In Pew’s analysis, a middle-class adult was defined as someone living in a household with an annual income two-thirds to double the national median household income, which was around $75,000 in 2022.
The analysis also factored in household size and local-area cost of living. A person living alone, naturally, requires less income than a larger family to support the same lifestyle. Similarly, a household in a part of the country with a lower cost of living would need less income than one in a high-priced area like Seattle. So Pew researchers adjusted for these two factors.
Olympia was the only metro area in the Western U.S. to make the top 10. Most of the metros with the highest share of middle-class residents were in the middle of the country, with a few on the East Coast.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, just 41% of adults in the San Jose, California, metro area were middle class — that was identical to the share who were upper-income in this affluent metro.
Pew analyzed 2022 income data from the U.S. Census Bureau for the report, assigning residents in each metro area to an income tier — low, middle, or high.
The Seattle metro area was closer to the middle of the pack, with 51% of adults in middle-class households. Twenty-one percent of Seattle-area adults were in the low-income tier, and 28% were in the high-income bracket.
Nationally, 52% of Americans lived in a middle-class household in 2023, which is down from 62% in 1970, according to a report released earlier this year by Pew. Thirty percent of Americans lived in a low-income household last year, and 19% were in the high-income tier.
The earlier release also showed the top metros for high-income residents were more populous areas, including Seattle, San Francisco, Boston and Washington, D.C. They also tended to be coastal metros, with the exception of Austin.
San Jose had the highest share of adults in the upper-income bracket, at 41%.
The places with the highest share of middle-class adults were all, like Olympia, small-to-medium size metro areas located in the northern half of the U.S. Interestingly, Olympia was one of three state-capital regions in the Top 10, the others being Dover, Delaware and Bismarck, North Dakota. This perhaps suggests areas with a high share of government jobs support a strong middle class.
The metro areas with the highest share of residents in the lower-income bracket were mostly in the South, led by the Laredo, Texas, metro at 46%.
