What are the nuances of median income?
Median income is the income of a household that is in the middle of all households in a defined grouping. As many households have income greater than the median as have income less than the median. This estimate is very expensive to calculate for the types of analysis we do. We have found a practical alternative which generates statistics that are not too dissimilar. This is the median of the geographic areas’ median household incomes. Simply put, each geographic area (county, census tract, zip code, block group, etc.) has a median income. We use the median of these amounts.
