Median Owner Income
Median household income over the past 12 months among households that own the home they live in.
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Median household income over the past 12 months among owner-occupied households in a tract. The Census Bureau publishes household income split by tenure, so owner and renter incomes can be read separately rather than blended into one tract-wide figure.
Tenure is the Bureau's term for whether a household owns or rents its home. The Bureau defines the owner side of it directly: "A housing unit is owner-occupied if the owner or co-owner lives in the unit, even if it is mortgaged or not fully paid for" (ACS Subject Definitions). Owners who are still paying a mortgage and owners who own outright are both included.
Income here is household income in the past 12 months, expressed by the Bureau in the inflation-adjusted dollars of the final year of each 5-year period.
Owner income differs from tract-wide median household income wherever ownership rates are low or ownership is concentrated at one end of the local income distribution. Read against owner cost burden, it separates places where ownership costs are high from places where owners can carry them.
Metrics in this family#
Median owner income
The current median, from the most recent ACS 5-year vintage.
Median owner income trend
Change in the median over 3, 5, or 10 years, selectable in the tool. Because the measure is a dollar amount, its trend is reported as a percentage change.
Considerations#
The trend is in nominal dollars. Each vintage carries its own inflation-adjusted dollar base, so a change measured across vintages reflects general price inflation as well as any real movement in local incomes. Comparisons between tracts within a single vintage are unaffected.
ACS 5-year estimates describe a five-year period, not a year, so windows shorter than five years compare periods that share years. The Bureau's guidance is "do not compare overlapping datasets" (Comparing ACS Data). The three-year window here is such a comparison: the two vintages share two of their five years. We publish it because it is the only recent-movement view the ACS supports at tract level, and read as a direction it still carries signal. It is not a before-and-after measurement, its movement is damped, and turning points show up late. Where the question is whether something genuinely changed, the five- and ten-year windows compare periods that do not overlap and answer it better.
A median is not an average and says nothing about the spread of income around it. Two tracts with the same median owner income can have very different income distributions.
Census tract boundaries were redrawn for the 2020 census. Estimates published on earlier boundaries are carried onto current ones before use — see geography.
Coverage runs through the most recent ACS 5-year release. Publication lags the present, and 5-year estimates are the least current of the ACS products by design.
The Bureau does not publish a median where a tract has too few owner-occupied households to support one, so this measure is missing in some heavily renter-occupied and in some very small tracts. Where it is published for a small sample it carries a wide margin of error, and the Bureau publishes a margin of error with every ACS estimate.
References#
- 1ACS Subject Definitionshttps://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/tech_docs/subject_definitions/2024_ACSSubjectDefinitions.pdf
- 2Comparing ACS Datahttps://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/guidance/comparing-acs-data.html