Money left after essentials
What US households have left once five categories of spending are paid for — food at home, housing, transportation, healthcare, and personal insurance & pensions — nationally, by income fifth. Derived from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys.
The analysis built on it is here: Americans got richer over the last decade — housing, food and healthcare took most of the middle class's raise .
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Free to use, including commercially. Credit us and you are done — the exact wording is at the bottom of this page.
Money left after five spending categories, by income fifth, 2013-2023
One row per income group per year. After-tax income, the five category totals, both essentials baskets, and the residual — nominal and in constant 2024 dollars — plus each basket as a share of after-tax income.
66 rows · 20 columns
Five spending categories as a share of total household spending, by income fifth, 1984-2024
One row per income group per year. The long series. In ratio form, so it needs no deflation — but see income_comparable_across_breaks before using the pre-tax income column across 2003/2004.
246 rows · 9 columns
CSV and Parquet carry identical values — they are written from one table in one pass, and the build refuses to finish unless every cell of each matches the other and matches the source it was derived from.
Documentation
- data-dictionary.csv — Data dictionary for both tables (9 KB)
- README.md — Overview, caveats and citation (9 KB)
- methodology.md — Full working methodology, published unedited (30 KB)
- LICENSE.txt — CC BY 4.0 legal code (19 KB)
- datapackage.json — Frictionless descriptor, with a SHA-256 for every file above
Read this before you quote a number
These are not disclaimers. Each one changes what a figure means, and the first two have already caused published work — ours and other people's — to say something untrue.
1. “Essential” labels a spending category, not a necessity
Every dollar inside those five categories counts, however discretionary it was. In 2023 the highest fifth spent 2.5x the lowest on food at home, 3.1x on housing and 5.1x on transportation. A high essentials share is not by itself evidence of financial pressure, and nothing here may be published as though it were.
2. Which fifth got squeezed reverses on the basket — only the dollar findings survive
Personal insurance & pensions is mostly Social Security contributions and retirement deposits — arguably saving, not consumption. Count it and the five fifths converge over 41 years; exclude it and they diverge sharply, with the top fifth's share flat across the whole span. Both baskets are in every row of this dataset and neither is privileged. Do not publish one alone.
3. The peak is 2020 — and “highest since” has to be checked per group
Essentials as a share of spending peaked in 2020 in every income group, on both baskets — a pandemic artifact, as discretionary spending collapsed. So never write “an all-time high”. We got that wrong internally before publishing, in three separate documents, because nobody had checked the maximum.
For all US households, 2024 is the highest in 41 years apart from 2020, on both baskets — that is the series our article headlines. It does not generalise to the individual fifths. Excluding 2020, the latest year is the maximum in only 5 of the 12 group-and-basket series: on the narrow basket the lowest fifth peaked in 2022, the second, third and fourth in 2021, and the highest fifth in 2013. Quoting one income group means taking that group's own maximum from the data.
4. Two large things are in neither the income nor the spending side
Employer-paid health insurance appears in neither — the employer share of family coverage was $20,143 in 2025 (KFF), about 3.25x the entire Consumer Expenditure healthcare line. That exact mismatch accounted for over half of the Cost-of-Thriving Index's headline finding and discredited it. Mortgage principal is excluded too, because the survey treats it as asset accumulation — so “total expenditures” is not money out the door.
5. The reference household changed
It aged (46.7 to 52.2) and shrank (2.6 to 2.4 people) across the published span. Older, smaller households need less, so part of any rising residual is demography rather than affordability.
Coverage, and why it stops
The dollar table runs 2013 to 2023. It starts in 2013 because that is when the survey switched from asking households to report their taxes to modelling them; across 2012–2013 real personal taxes step from $3,041 to $10,008, which is an artifact, not a tax increase.
It stops in 2023 permanently. After-tax income is discontinued after 2023 because the tax model behind it is no longer maintained. This dataset can never gain another year of dollars. Spending shares continue to 2024, which is why that table runs longer.
There is deliberately no 40-year dollar series. The survey's coverage of national consumption fell from roughly 0.795 of the national accounts in 1984 to 0.536 in 2024, and under-captured spending mechanically manufactures a rising residual. A long-run dollar chart would mostly show survey drift. The share series is a ratio and cancels part of that — it does not eliminate it.
How we know it is right
The 2023 figures reconcile against a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis primer that used the same construction and published its own numbers. The five-category basket is theirs, not ours — which is the point. A Reserve Bank owns the normative call about what counts as essential; we own only the arithmetic.
| 2023, nominal | This dataset | St. Louis Fed |
|---|---|---|
| After-tax income, all households | $87,869 | ~$88,000 |
| Left after essentials, all households | $27,491 | ~$27,000 |
| Left after essentials, lowest fifth | −$10,648 | ~−$11,000 |
The full working methodology — including the two findings we withdrew and why each was wrong — is published unedited as methodology.md in the bundle.
Source
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Surveys LABSTAT bulk time series (download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/). Public domain (US federal government work). Exact input files are pinned by SHA-256 in methodology.md.
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U (CUUR0000SA0, annual average) Used to express dollars in constant 2024 terms. The choice of deflator is ours, not BLS's.
The underlying survey is a work of the US federal government and is in the public domain. The CC BY 4.0 licence covers our derivation — the baskets, the residual, the deflation, the column design and the documentation. It places no restriction on the public-domain figures underneath.
Citation
If you use this, please cite it like this:
Efficient Dollar, "Money Left After Essentials, US Households by Income Fifth" (1.0.0), https://efficientdollar.com/data/leftover-money-after-essentials/ — CC BY 4.0. Derived from US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Surveys.
Found an error? Tell us. Corrections are published here with the date and what changed. A wrong number that reaches you is the failure this whole bundle exists to make less likely.