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Here's what you need to earn to make the top 1 percent club in Texas
Ben Franklin staring at you from a $100 dollar bill. That's money.
For those in Dallas wondering what kind of money they need to earn to secure a place in the top one percent, there's a new study from SmartAsset which has the answer:
The pre-tax salary required to be considered one of the highest earners in Texas amounts to $762,090 in 2024.
The study has a list of states by income and Texas comes in at No. 14. This is not a list you want to top: It's a lot harder to be in the top one percent in states like Connecticut, which leads the nation with the highest income threshold required to be in the top one percent. If you live in Connecticut, you need to make over $1.15 million pre-tax.
While Texas maintains its status at No. 14 for the second year in a row, the actual dollars involved have jumped dramatically. In 2023, in order to make the top one percent, your pre-tax earnings had to be a mere $631,849. The 2024 benchmark is $130,241 more than it was in 2023.
But there's plenty of Texans who make the grade: According to the study, 126,128 Texans are within the top one percent of earners.
To determine the income needed to be in the top one percent of earners in each state, SmartAsset analyzed 2021 IRS data for individual tax filers, which is the most recent year where data was available. Income data was then adjusted to June 2024 dollars.
The study says the median income in the U.S. comes out to roughly $75,000, and half of Americans are making even less than that. The income disparity is plainly obvious when high-income earners make (at a minimum) 10 times more than the national median income.
The report goes on to say top-earning Americans make up a "disproportionately large part of the tax base," as their income results in paying a 37 percent federal tax bracket rate. (That is, if these high earners are even paying taxes in the first place, considering America's wealthiest are already evading over $150 billion a year in taxes.)
"While state and local level taxes may impact the spread of high earners in those areas, the cost of living can also be drastically different nationwide," the report said. "As a result, what it takes to be considered a top one percent income earner can differ by over $500,000 from state to state."
The top 10 states with the highest thresholds to be considered in the top one percent of earners in the U.S. are:
- No. 1 – Connecticut ($1,152,254)
- No. 2 – Massachusetts ($1,113,662)
- No. 3 – California ($1,035,673)
- No. 4 – Washington ($989,649)
- No. 5 – New Jersey ($975,645)
- No. 6 – New York ($965,645)
- No. 7 – Colorado ($865,700)
- No. 8 – Florida ($852,206)
- No. 9 – Wyoming ($843,121)
- No. 10 – New Hampshire ($811,098)
