POTUSRECORDThe office changes.Presidential performance / Income
Follow real median household income across equal presidential windows, using Census values expressed in the same 2025 dollars.
Median pretax household money income in Census-published 2025 dollars. Processing and population-control breaks remain unbridged.
Baseline: 2024
Viewing: 2025 · year 1
The household at the middle of the income distribution. Pretax money income, in 2025 dollars.
* Source-version boundary. See comparability notes.
The same real income series, with the year before each window set to 100.
* Source-version boundary. See comparability notes.
One series. Two ways to read it. The left panel shows the real dollar level; the right shows its change from a fixed baseline. These are household medians, not individual wages or the growth of the same households over time.
Same calendar windows. No causal score. Inherited conditions, Congress, household composition and other events affect income. An observed change does not isolate a president’s contribution.
Each preceding calendar-year baseline compared with year four. Chronological order, without a performance ranking.
Values: baseline → endpoint, in 2025 dollars. Changes are total percentages, not annualized rates. *Source-version boundaries limit comparability; estimates are not fully harmonized across survey redesigns or revisions. Numerical differences are not automatically statistically significant. Select a window to inspect its path and notes.
2024 → 2025 · $85,210 → $87,460 · +2.6%
Half of households have more income and half have less. Census adds the money income of household members aged 15 and over, including earnings and qualifying cash benefits. Income is measured before taxes; capital gains and noncash benefits are excluded. This is not take-home pay.
Every amount uses Census’s published 2025-dollar series. Census links CPI-U-X1 for 1967–1977, R-CPI-U-RS for 1978–1999 and C-CPI-U from 2000. We do not apply the separate CPI chart’s inflation rate again.
CPS ASEC measures annual income using a household survey. Household size, composition and the number of earners can change. Sampling uncertainty, nonresponse and historical revisions matter; the median does not describe every household’s experience.
Census P60-289, Table 2; published September 15, 2026. Frozen edition retrieved October 1, 2026, with outcomes through 2025. Real dollar change = selected income − baseline income. Index = selected income ÷ baseline income × 100. Total percent change = index − 100. Calculations use published dollar amounts before display rounding.
The baseline is the calendar year before each window; year one and year four are alternative endpoints. Calendar years include the January handover and are not exact inauguration-to-inauguration periods. Lines connect annual observations, not estimated monthly incomes. Unpublished future outcomes are left empty.
The selected series uses the redesigned 2013 income questions and updated 2017 processing. Alternative source rows remain available in the JSON download. Revised population controls, including the current 2024 estimate, remain attached to their years. Broken lines mark source-version boundaries; a shared dollar unit does not remove changes in survey methods.
Census’s 2025 inflation adjustment includes an approximation for the unavailable October 2025 price index: the geometric mean of the September and November indexes. We retain the resulting published real-income estimates. Margins of error below are at 90% confidence; they are not margins for a change between two years. Only the report’s stated 2024→2025 significance finding is reproduced here.
| Year | Real median | 90% margin | Index | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023Before window | $84,730 | ±$667 | 99.4 | — |
| 2024Baseline | $85,210 | ±$1,069 | 100.0 | 2024 estimates use Vintage 2025 population controls and differ from the previous report. |
| 2025 | $87,460 | ±$1,040 | 102.6 | — |
Census P60-289 Table 2: pretax household money income, not individual wages or disposable income. All displayed levels are published 2025-dollar values. The frozen September 2026 vintage includes revised 2024 population controls and historical survey and processing qualifications.