Published by Instant Press on behalf of Fight For A Living Wage.
Income mobility is the chance that your income ends up somewhere other than where your parents’ income was. In the United States that chance has narrowed. Children born in recent decades are less likely to out-earn their parents than children born in the 1940s, and the explanation sits less in individual effort than in price: the assets that used to carry a household upward, a house above all, now cost multiples of what a median income can reach. The U.S. Census Bureau, Pew Research Center, and the Federal Reserve each measure a piece of this, and the pieces agree.
Three kinds of mobility, and why the distinction decides the argument
People use “mobility” to mean at least three different things. Sorting them out matters, because a country can look mobile on one measure and stuck on another.
Absolute mobility
Absolute mobility asks whether you earn more than your parents did at the same age, adjusted for inflation. It is the version most families have in mind when they talk about doing better than the previous generation. Researchers who matched adult earnings to parents’ earnings using tax and census records have found this share falling steeply across the twentieth century, with the sharpest decline among children born into the middle of the distribution. Absolute mobility can rise for everyone at once, because it depends on growth rather than on rank.
Relative mobility
Relative mobility asks whether you moved in the ranking. If your parents sat in the bottom fifth of the income distribution and you reach the middle fifth, you moved up in relative terms even if your inflation-adjusted dollars barely budged. Relative mobility is zero-sum by construction: for you to move up a rung, someone else moves down. This is the measure that sociologists and economists use for cross-country comparisons, and it is the one where the United States performs worse than most of its peers.
Intergenerational persistence
Intergenerational persistence, sometimes called the intergenerational elasticity of income, measures how much of a parent’s income advantage carries over to the child. A persistence figure near zero would describe a country where your parents’ earnings tell you nothing about yours. A figure near one would describe a caste system. Every real country sits in between, and the United States sits closer to the sticky end than several other wealthy countries.
What the data shows
Pew Research Center’s long-running work on the middle class gives one of the clearest readings. The share of American adults living in middle-income households fell from about 61 percent in 1971 to roughly half in recent years, with the adults who left that band split between the tiers above and below it. A middle that holds a smaller share of the population is a middle with less room to land in.
The U.S. Census Bureau put median household income at about $80,000 as of 2023, and its income tables show the top fifth of households receiving roughly half of all household income. Those Census income tables are updated annually and are the primary source for distribution figures that get quoted secondhand.
Wealth concentrates harder than income. The Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances put median family net worth at roughly $193,000 in 2022, and the same survey shows net worth climbing from the low tens of thousands of dollars for families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution to well over a million for families at the top. Wealth is what carries a family through a layoff, a hospital bill, or a down payment, which makes its distribution a better predictor of a child’s prospects than a single year of earnings.
A worked example: the median household against the median house
Take a household earning the Census median of about $80,000. The median U.S. home sale price ran roughly $400,000 to $420,000 in 2024, per figures from the National Association of Realtors and the Census Bureau. That puts the price of a typical home at about five times median household income. In the 1980s the same ratio sat closer to three times.
Work the down payment. Twenty percent of a $410,000 home is $82,000, which is slightly more than a full year of that household’s gross pre-tax income. At the 1980s ratio of three times income, a typical home would cost about $240,000 against the same $80,000 salary, and 20 percent of that is $48,000, or roughly seven months of gross income. The deposit a family has to assemble before owning anything has gone from most of a year’s pay to more than all of it, measured against the same median wage.
Now subtract the costs that compete for the same savings. Child Care Aware reports center-based childcare commonly running $10,000 to $17,000 or more per year per child. KFF put the total annual premium for family health coverage around $25,000 in 2024, with the worker’s share above $6,000 before any deductible. The Education Data Initiative puts average student loan debt near $38,000 per borrower, against a national total of roughly $1.7 to $1.77 trillion in the Federal Reserve’s G.19 consumer credit series.
A household at the national median income carrying childcare for one child, a family premium share, and an average loan balance has little left to convert into the asset that drives most American wealth accumulation. That arithmetic, repeated across a generation, is what a stalled mobility statistic looks like from the inside.
Why mobility stalled
Three structural shifts account for most of it, and none of them is a budgeting failure.
Asset prices outran wages. Housing is the clearest case, where the price-to-income ratio roughly doubled from its 1980s level on the NAR and Census figures above. A family that bought early captured decades of appreciation. A family trying to enter now faces a larger deposit against the same paycheck, and the gap compounds because the deposit itself has to be saved out of income that housing costs are already consuming.
The wage floor stopped moving. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour since 2009, per the U.S. Department of Labor, the longest stretch without an increase since the floor was created. BLS tracks what workers actually earn through its Current Population Survey program, and the distance between the statutory floor and what local costs require has widened for seventeen years.
The cost of the ladder itself rose. Education, childcare, and healthcare are the inputs a family buys to move up, and each has climbed faster than earnings. Fight For A Living Wage, a nonpartisan grassroots 501(c)(3) nonprofit, treats this as an affordability problem spanning housing, healthcare, childcare, food, transport, education, and retirement rather than an argument about the minimum wage alone, on the reasoning that the wage floor is one symptom of a broader gap.
What these numbers do not settle
Mobility statistics describe cohorts, not individuals. Plenty of people born in the bottom fifth reach the top fifth, and the aggregate figures say nothing about any particular family. The measures also lag by years, since researchers have to wait for children to reach an age where their earnings mean something, which means today’s published mobility numbers describe people born decades ago.
What the figures do establish is the shape of the slope. When a typical home costs five times a typical income instead of three, when the wage floor holds still for seventeen years, and when childcare and health coverage each claim five figures a year, the distance a household has to climb grows while the rungs stay where they are. Census, the Federal Reserve, and Pew all publish their underlying tables, and the reading holds across all three.