Methodology
This site takes your household income and tells you where it sits in your country's income distribution. Below: what data we use, how we compute the answer, and where the answer is wrong.
Two numbers per country
Every country in the table reduces to two published figures: the Gini coefficient of equivalised disposable income and the mean equivalised disposable income. From those we derive a lognormal distribution:
σ = √2 · Φ⁻¹((G+1)/2)
μ = ln(mean) − σ²/2
percentile(x) = Φ((ln(x) − μ) / σ)
A lognormal is not the true shape of an income distribution, but it is close in the middle and it is fully determined by those two published numbers. That is the whole reason the site can cover thirty countries without thirty separate models.
Equivalised income
Household incomes are not comparable as they stand: €60,000 shared by four people is not €60,000 earned by one. Each country's statistics office divides household income by an equivalence scale, and the scale is not the same everywhere:
modified OECD scale = 1 + 0.5 × (adults − 1) + 0.3 × children
square-root scale = √(household size)
Eurostat and TÜİK publish on the modified OECD scale; the OECD Income Distribution Database publishes on the square-root scale. The two differ by up to 16% in larger households. We apply whichever scale the country's own source used — mixing them produces a wrong answer that looks perfectly reasonable.
Inflation
Income statistics measure a past calendar year; you type today's money. Without a correction everyone looks richer than they are. We scale your figure back to the source's reference year using that country's consumer price index, measured up to the most recent published month and extended to today at the last twelve months' rate. This is the only number on the site that goes stale with time, so it is refreshed monthly.
Countries and sources
Thirty countries. European figures come from Eurostat EU-SILC, the rest from the OECD Income Distribution Database, and Türkiye from TÜİK — each country's own statistical authority where one publishes on this basis.
- Austria
- 0.274 · 2024
- Australia
- 0.325 · 2020
- Belgium
- 0.234 · 2024
- Brazil
- 0.451 · 2022
- Canada
- 0.292 · 2022
- Switzerland
- 0.310 · 2023
- Chile
- 0.460 · 2022
- Czechia
- 0.240 · 2024
- Germany
- 0.301 · 2024
- Denmark
- 0.282 · 2024
- Spain
- 0.308 · 2024
- Finland
- 0.271 · 2024
- France
- 0.304 · 2024
- United Kingdom
- 0.355 · 2023
- Greece
- 0.320 · 2023
- Ireland
- 0.272 · 2024
- Israel
- 0.342 · 2023
- Italy
- 0.310 · 2024
- Japan
- 0.334 · 2021
- South Korea
- 0.324 · 2022
- Mexico
- 0.400 · 2022
- Netherlands
- 0.259 · 2024
- Norway
- 0.237 · 2024
- New Zealand
- 0.326 · 2022
- Poland
- 0.249 · 2024
- Portugal
- 0.309 · 2024
- Romania
- 0.273 · 2024
- Sweden
- 0.286 · 2024
- Türkiye
- 0.410 · 2024
- United States
- 0.396 · 2023
The world ranking
The second number on the result page answers a different question, and it is computed differently. Your national percentile uses equivalised income — household income divided by your country's official equivalence scale. The world ranking uses income per person — household income divided by the number of people in the household.
That is not an inconsistency, it is the only honest option. Most countries do not publish equivalised income; the World Bank's global database is built per person. Comparing an equivalised figure against a per-person distribution would move you roughly ten percentile points up the world ranking without producing any error.
- Countries
- 217
- Share of world population
- 99.7%
- Measured by consumption survey
- 74%
- Reference year
- 2025
- World median
- $9.58 / day
Incomes are converted to 2021 international dollars at purchasing power parity, so a euro in Germany and a lira in Türkiye are compared by what they buy, not by the exchange rate. Source: World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform, using its lineup estimates so that surveys from different years are aligned to one.
Two limits worth knowing. About 74% of the world's population is measured by consumption surveys rather than income surveys, and consumption surveys systematically show less inequality; this is not corrected for. And a single purchasing-power factor is applied to a whole country, so living in an expensive city inside a cheap country makes you look richer than you are.
Where this is wrong
The lognormal is accurate in the middle and drifts in the tails. Real distributions have a pile-up near the minimum wage and a heavier top tail than a lognormal; if you are very near the bottom or the top, your percentile is less precise than if you are near the middle.
Household income is assumed to be shared equally within the household, which it is not. Undeclared income is under-captured by surveys, and by different amounts in different countries. Cost of living varies inside a country as much as between countries, and none of this is adjusted for.
Occupation and city breakdowns come from what visitors submit, and visitors are not a representative sample. That is why no breakdown is shown until a segment has 100 records — a median drawn from twenty self-selected entries is not a median.
Reproducing the table
The country table is generated by a script that fetches Eurostat, OECD and World Bank directly. Every row is checked against a consistency test before it is published: a lognormal's mean-to-median ratio is fixed by its Gini, so a published mean and median that disagree with the published Gini indicate the data is wrong, and that row is dropped rather than shown.