It takes $51,900 in household income to be right in the middle of the US income distribution, the Census Bureau reported last week. You'd have to earn more than five times that if you want to be in the top 1 percent, and even then you'd have to move to Idaho.
Using Census data, Business Insider put together a map approximating where the cutoff is to be in the top 1 percent by household income in each state (click to see a bigger version):
Source: Business Insider
The figures shouldn't be taken as precise measurements, BI's Andy Kiersz writes, but rather as approximations.
What it takes to be in the top 1 percent can range widely by state; in Idaho, at the bottom of the spectrum, your household just has to earn around $274,000 in a year. In the District of Columbia, at the wealthier end, it's $688,000. Just behind DC is the state with the highest bar, Connecticut, at $642,000.
Those may strike you as some large variations, but the wealthy have congregated in a few places in America, and particularly in New York City. New York City accounts for nearly one-quarter of all the wealth of all "high net worth individuals" in the US (those with $1 million or more in investable assets), as consulting firm Capgemini and RBC Wealth Management reported last week. In addition, 12 metro areas account for 75 percent of all those high net worth people's wealth.
This map, of course, only reflects income. To be in the top 1 percent of Americans in terms of wealth, you need to save or invest a lot of that income. It takes nearly $2.4 million in assets to be in that top tier, as my colleague Ezra Klein wrote last week.
