Top 10% captured 54% of June income growth, Real-Time Inequality shows

Bottom 90% saw share of disposable income shrink in June

The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday that real disposable personal income — income after taxes and adjusted for inflation — rose 0.3% in May, consistent with the prior month’s revision. The aggregate figure, however, masks a widening gap in how income gains were distributed across the population, according to monthly distributional data from the World Inequality Lab’s Real-Time Inequality project (realtimeinequality.org), which published updated figures in coordination with the BEA’s Personal Income and Outlays release.

The Real-Time Inequality data, which uses the Distributional National Accounts (DINA) framework developed by economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, breaks down income growth by percentile. The data show that the top 10% of earners captured 54% of total income growth in June, continuing a trend of top-heavy gains observed throughout 2025 and 2026. After accounting for inflation and taxes, real disposable income for the bottom 90% of households declined in June, the Real-Time Inequality data show.

Last month’s BEA report showed a 0.3% rise in real disposable personal income for May, a figure that the new distributional cuts refine by showing the gains were concentrated at the top.

The BEA’s aggregate personal saving rate, reported as part of the same release, is a household-sector average that does not reflect the distribution of saving across income groups. Economists — including those at the World Inequality Lab — have noted that household saving is concentrated in the top deciles, meaning movements in the aggregate rate can be driven almost entirely by changes in the behavior of the highest-earning households rather than by the broader population.

The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker, a separate gauge focusing on wages for continuously employed workers, showed median year-over-year wage growth of 3.6% in June, according to the central bank’s data. That figure, which adjusts for compositional changes in the workforce, provides a labor-market signal that contrasts with the income trends captured by the BEA and Real-Time Inequality measures.

The Consumer Price Index rose 3.5% year-over-year in June, based on FRED vintage data, further eroding real purchasing power for households that saw little or no nominal income growth.

The Congressional Budget Office’s most recent Distribution of Household Income report provides the annual benchmark for these distributional cuts; the most recent CBO estimates show that from 1979 to 2019, the share of post-tax-and-transfer income going to the top 1% rose by roughly 7 percentage points after adjusting for household size, while the share going to the bottom quintile fell.

The Piketty-Saez-Zucman (PSZ) methodology used by Real-Time Inequality produces larger measured long-run increases in the top 1% income share than the alternative methodology developed by economists Gerald Auten and David Splinter, which showed a much flatter long-run trajectory when published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2024. The gap between the two series — roughly 4.6 percentage points in the cumulative 1960–2019 pre-tax top-1% share — turns on how each allocates unreported business income, retained corporate earnings, and employer-provided benefits.

Personal income as measured by BEA excludes several components of economic well-being that are captured elsewhere: household production (cooking, childcare, elder care) adds an estimated 17% to 25% to measured GDP, according to economists Nancy Folbre and others, and BEA’s National Income and Product Accounts contain large imputations for imputed rent, employer-paid health insurance, and financial intermediation services that affect measured personal income.