Bulletin: U.S. Household Income Drops in Pandemic

The Census Bureau has just announced that median household income in the United States declined by 2.6% in 2020 compared to 2019. This is the first statistically significant reduction in income since 2011. In 2020, the median household income was $67,521, down from $69.560 in the last pre-pandemic year of 2019.


Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.