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I’m a little late to this since FRED took its time updating, but the annual report of median household income for the US was released on Tuesday for 2023. 

This is an important statistic about the well-being of, well, the median American household, so one of my pet peeves is that it is only released annually, and with a 9-month delay at that. So Tuesday’s release tells us about where an important metric was about 18 months ago. Yeah, that’s a problem in my book.

In any event, median household income rose a hair under 4.0% in 2023, to a level only exceeded - by 0.7% - in 2019:

That compares very favorably with the average annual gain in the previous 10 years which was 0.7%. On an annual basis, it was only exceeded by 2015 and 2019 in the previous 10 years.

I really wish the Census Bureau would update this statistic at least quarterly since it is based on the monthly employment report. But since it doesn’t several private research companies have estimated it on their own. Most recently, the mantle has been taken up by Motio Research, which I have highlighted in several previous posts. Here’s their most recent update:

To see how accurate they were in real-time, I went back and compared their monthly 2022 and 2023 updates with the official figures. On an average basis, they had real median household *declining* -0.1% in 2023 YoY. But they had 2022 and 2023 exceeding 2019 by 1.6% and 1.5%, respectively. Even on a year-end vs. year-end basis, they only had 2023 exceeding 2022 by 0.9%.

Obviously, the private estimates have been missing the mark.

But stay tuned, one year from now we will find out how well households made out this year.

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