The Ledger · Edition one
An American household, 1900–2025
Was it really easier for my grandparents: one paycheck, a house, a car, the kids?
The claim usually turns up at a kitchen table, in the middle of a conversation about rent. One wage used to be enough. A house, a car, children, and somebody at home during the day. It lands because it is specific. It names things you can picture and cannot price. This page does not settle it for you. It sets out the household across twelve documented eras, using the numbers the surveys of those years actually collected, and leaves the reading to you.
Every price here appears twice: in the money of its year, and in the hours of work it took to earn that money. The second axis is the one that survives a century of currency. It is also the one that misbehaves: some things cost more money and less work than they used to, some cost less money and more work, and a few move the same way on both. Neither column on its own tells you which case you are looking at, so the surface never hides either. The dollars-and-hours control changes which one is emphasised and nothing else.
The other rule is that the construct sits above the numbers. “The average family” is not one thing across a century: the survey changes, the population it samples changes, the definition of a family changes, and the years the record exists at all are not the years you would choose. So each era carries a strip naming whose average it is, from which survey, under which definition, and dating each value to the year its source prints rather than to the year of the panel. Where the record has no figure, the line says that instead of guessing one.
The eras are decadal where the century is quiet and anchored at documented breaks where it is not. The page carries 1900, 1915, 1929 with 1933 beside it, 1944, 1955, 1965, 1973, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015 and 2025, and it closes on the claim it was built to test.
How work-time is calculated, and what the wage is
The work-time figure beside every price is that price divided by one hour of a production worker’s pay in the same year: a manufacturing worker’s through 1965, and from 1973 a production or nonsupervisory worker’s across all private industry. Nothing else is done to it: no deflator, no adjustment, no chaining.
The wage series
- 1900 and 1915 come from the payroll-manufacturing column of the wage series Paul Douglas assembled for Real Wages in the United States, 1890–1926, as the Census Bureau reprints it in Historical Statistics of the United States (series D 770): 15.2 cents an hour in 1900 and 21.2 cents in 1915.
- 1929 to 1965 come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics series for production workers in all manufacturing, as the same volume prints it (series D 802).
- 1973 onward come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics series for production and nonsupervisory employees across all private industry (CEU0500000008), part-time work included. Manufacturing is a shrinking share of payroll jobs across these panels, and a manufacturing wage becomes a narrower and narrower thing to call an hour of work.
What the wage is not
- It is an average, never a median. A median hourly wage does not exist for most of this century, and switching constructs in the middle of a series would be worse than saying so.
- It is a wage, not a household budget. It prices goods in work-time; it does not stand in for what a family had coming in. The income lines do that work, separately, and say which universe they count.
- Douglas’s figures before 1914 are, in the Census note’s own words, extrapolations backward from the 1914 level, so the 1900 hour is an estimate and is treated as one.
- The same note warns that the all-manufacturing total in that table, which reads 21.6 cents for 1900, is “too high” because union scales are over-weighted in it, and suggests the payroll columns alone to represent all manufacturing. That is the column used here. A reader who prefers the total should expect every 1900 work-time figure on this page to shrink by about a third.
The joins
These series are not the same measurement and no value is carried across the joins between them. The first two overlap closely where they meet: at 1909 the Douglas column reads 17.9 cents and the Bureau’s reads 19 cents; at 1914 they read 21.3 and 22 cents. Close is not the same, and comparisons that straddle 1915 and 1929 are comparisons across two instruments.
The move to all private industry at 1973 is a second join of the same kind. Both series exist through the 1960s: at 1964 the manufacturing series (D 802) reads $2.53 and the total-private series reads $2.53; at 1970 they read $3.36 and $3.41. Nothing is carried across this join either, and comparisons that straddle 1965 and 1973 are also comparisons across two instruments.
Era one
1900: the century’s gate
At the 1900 census the largest single occupation in the country was running a farm. Farmers and farm managers numbered 5,763 thousand and farm laborers and foremen another 5,125 thousand, so that farm work of some kind accounted for 10,888 of the 29,030 thousand people the census counted as having work experience, which is 37.5 per cent of them. Operatives, the largest group outside farming, were 3,720 thousand. The household in this panel is therefore not a factory household by default. It is a farm household about as often as it is anything else, and the two lived under different roofs on different terms.
The working week ran to 62.1 hours in the payroll manufacturing industries. The figure usually quoted for 1900 is 59 hours, and it comes from the same table: it is the all-manufacturing total, which weights union scales into the average. Both are in the record and they differ by three hours a week. A full-time manufacturing employee earned $487 across the year. What a family had coming in was measured once, close by: the Bureau of Labor’s 1901 cost-of-living survey canvassed 25,440 families of wage workers and of salaried persons earning not more than $1,200, in the principal industrial centers of 33 states, and found an average income of $749.50. That is an average, not a median, and it is an average of city wage-earner households, not of America: farm families and business owners are outside it entirely, and no national family income exists until the Census median series opens in 1947. On why jobs pay what they pay the chapters carry the mechanism; this page carries the record.
Ownership at 1900 is the clearest case on the whole surface of a national average hiding the thing it averages. 46.7 per cent of occupied homes reporting tenure were owned. Split farm from city and the number comes apart: 64.4 per cent of farm homes were owned against 36.5 per cent of the rest. The farm household owned its house because the house came with the land. The city household rented.
There were 4.8 people in the average occupied dwelling, and 20.0 per cent of women were counted in the labor force at the June census, on a basis that included girls of fourteen. Men married at a median age of 25.9 and women at 21.9. Eight thousand motor cars were registered in the entire country.
Occupations and households come from the decennial census: persons 14 and over for occupations, occupied housing units for the home. Wages and hours are Douglas’s payroll-manufacturing series, an average, and before 1914 an extrapolation backward. Food prices are the Bureau of Labor Statistics retail averages for industrial localities, which before 1915 the Bureau estimated from price relatives rather than computing directly. Every value is dated to the year its source prints. No national home-value reading exists here or on 1915: the 1900, 1910 and 1920 general schedules stopped at tenure and encumbrance, while their special mortgage studies did not publish an all-owned-home national median. The 1930 population census did publish a median for owned nonfarm homes, on a third instrument and universe, and it appears only in the 1929 column. Nothing is estimated backward into either gap.
- Out of work the era’s own record of insecurity, drawn from the same table that supplies the 1933 figure, so the two can be read against each other rather than against a memory.
- In service private household workers were 1,526 of the 5,319 thousand women the census counted at work, 28.7 per cent of them, and the largest single line among women’s occupations. A household that employed another household is the construct strip made flesh.
- Farm and city the tenure gap is the housing story of this era and a single national rate erases it.
- Electric light the series prints nothing for 1900 and reads 8.0 per cent of dwellings at 1907, its first figure, which is shown at its own date rather than pulled back.
- Where the money went the 1901 survey priced the whole budget and not just the wage. Food took 42.5 per cent of what the family spent, housing 23.3, clothing 14.0, and what remained for everything else was $155. Against $750 of income those families spent $769.
- Insurance the survey counts healthcare and insurance as one category, at $40 a year. The category is as much the finding as the figure: care and protection were bought together and the record does not separate them for decades.
The 1900 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1900 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Farm work, 10,888 of 29,030 thousand, 37.5% |
| Hours in the working week | 62.1 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $487 a year |
| Out of work | 5.0% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $749.50 average, urban wage-earner families, 1901 |
| Saved out of income | the national accounts do not reach |
| Where the money went | Food 42.5%, housing 23.3%, clothing 14.0% of $769 spent, 1901 |
| Insurance | Healthcare and insurance, $40 a year, 5.2% |
| The home | |
| The home | 46.7% owned |
| What a house was worth | no national value collected |
| The new house | no floor-area series |
| Farm and city | Farm 64.4% owned, nonfarm 36.5% |
| What the roof cost | $179 a year on housing, 1901 |
| Mortgage payment and term | no survey of mortgage terms |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | 8.0% of dwellings, 1907 |
| Electricity used | the meter column is blank |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 16.2 cents a kilowatt-hour, 1902 |
| The bills | no fuel census yet |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 4.8 people; 20.0% of women in the labor force |
| In service | 1,526 of 5,319 thousand women at work, 28.7% |
| Getting about | 8 thousand motor cars registered |
| Trucks on the register | none on the register |
| Bought | 1900 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | 20.9 cents · 1 hr 23 min |
| half a gallon of milk, delivered | 13.6 cents · 54 min |
| a pound of butter | 26.1 cents · 1 hr 43 min |
| a pound of round steak | 13.2 cents · 52 min |
| a pound of bread | not priced |
| a gallon of gasoline | not priced |
| a first-class stamp | 2 cents · 8 min |
Era two
1915: the industrial wage household
Fifteen years on, the working week in the payroll manufacturing industries had come down to 58.2 hours and annual earnings per full-time manufacturing employee had reached $661. Registered motor cars had gone from eight thousand to 2,332 thousand. The country was industrialising fast enough that the census, which only counts every ten years, cannot show you 1915 at all: farm work was 11,533 of 37,291 thousand workers at the 1910 census, 30.9 per cent, and 11,390 of 42,206 thousand by the January 1920 one, 27.0 per cent. Farmers and farm managers, 6,163 thousand of them in 1910, were still the largest single occupation.
Several lines on this panel are simply empty. There is no household size for 1915, no ownership rate, no median age at first marriage and no measured family income, because the instruments that would have produced them ran on the census cycle or did not exist. The panel shows the census years that bracket it, at their own dates, and interpolates nothing between them. Ownership stood at 45.9 per cent in 1910 and 45.6 per cent in 1920, drifting down at each census since 1900.
Unemployment in 1915 was 8.5 per cent of the civilian labor force, the highest reading between 1900 and 1920 in the series the Census reprints. A reader coming to the pre-war industrial wage expecting a settled prosperity has to hold that number at the same time.
The earnings line above is an industry average. Beside it sits a pay figure from a single company which is not a wage at all. On 5 January 1914, to take effect on the twelfth, the Ford Motor Company announced a working day cut from nine hours to eight and minimum daily pay raised, in Raff and Summers’s words, “from roughly $2.34 to $5.00 a day for those workers who were judged to qualify” — with the extra amount, they note, “labelled as profit sharing rather than wages.” Who was judged to qualify was settled by three conditions. The payments went to men over twenty-two, and to women and younger men only where they were supporting a family; they required certification by a Sociological Department whose 150 inspectors visited workers at home, a 1914 company pamphlet explaining that a worker joined the list of profit sharers only once the company “is satisfied that he will not debauch the additional money he receives”; and, from the autumn of that year rather than from the announcement, they required six months’ service. How many collected is a question the record answers more than once: Ford claimed that all but 1 per cent received a payment of at least five dollars a day, while Lee wrote in 1916 that 69 per cent of the labor force had qualified for profit sharing within six months, 87 per cent after a year and 90 per cent by the middle of 1916 — figures which, Raff and Summers add, appear to leave out anyone with less than six months in. The two are not counting the same thing. A five-dollar day, then, and a conditional one, and not the same object as an hourly wage.
Wages, hours, prices and unemployment are annual figures for 1915. Income and housing spending come from the nearest expenditure survey, 1918–19, and are printed with that date. Households, occupations and tenure are decennial, so the nearest census years are shown with their dates. There is no 1915 household size, no 1915 tenure rate and no 1915 marriage age, and none is interpolated here. The Ford figures are not a survey: they are Raff and Summers’s reading of the announcement, of company documents and of the contemporary press, and the estimates of how many qualified are attributed in their paper to sources that disagree.
- Out of work the decade’s worst reading falls in this era, which cuts against the shape the era is usually remembered in.
- Electric light the light arrived in the cities first, and the series’s own 1912 reading of 15.9 per cent of dwellings dates it. The next figure the table prints is 1917.
- Electricity used the companion column prints its first figure here, 264 kilowatt-hours a year per residential customer at 1912. It is blank at 1902 and at 1907, which is what the 1900 panel’s own line for it prints in place of a figure.
- Farm and city the two censuses that bracket the year show the tenure gap holding: 62.8 per cent of farm homes owned in 1910 against 38.4 per cent of the rest.
- Where the money went housing took 23.3 per cent of spending, the same share as 1901 though the money had nearly doubled. The wave also counted how the year ended: 70.2 per cent of families finished in surplus, 23.7 per cent in deficit.
The 1915 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1915 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Farm work, 11,533 of 37,291 thousand in 1910, 30.9% |
| Hours in the working week | 58.2 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $661 a year |
| Out of work | 8.5% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $1,518 average, expenditure-survey families, 1918-19 |
| Saved out of income | the national accounts do not reach |
| Where the money went | Food 38.2%, housing 23.3% of $1,434 spent, 1918-19 |
| Insurance | no healthcare row in this wave |
| The home | |
| The home | 45.9% owned in 1910, 45.6% in 1920 |
| What a house was worth | no national value collected |
| The new house | no floor-area series |
| Farm and city | Farm 62.8% owned, nonfarm 38.4% in 1910 |
| What the roof cost | $334 a year on housing, 1918-19 |
| Mortgage payment and term | no survey of mortgage terms |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | 15.9% of dwellings, 1912 |
| Electricity used | 264 kilowatt-hours a year, 1912 |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 9.10 cents in 1912, 7.52 in 1917 |
| The bills | no fuel census yet |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 4.5 people in 1910, 4.3 in 1920 |
| In service | 1,784 of 7,445 thousand women at work in 1910, 24.0% |
| Getting about | 2,332 thousand motor cars registered |
| Trucks on the register | 159 thousand trucks registered |
| Bought | 1915 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | 34.1 cents · 1 hr 37 min |
| half a gallon of milk, delivered | 17.8 cents · 50 min |
| a pound of butter | 35.8 cents · 1 hr 41 min |
| a pound of round steak | 23 cents · 1 hr 5 min |
| a pound of bread | 7 cents · 20 min |
| a gallon of gasoline | not priced |
| a first-class stamp | 2 cents · 6 min |
Era three
1929 and 1933: the same ledger at boom and at bust
This panel carries two columns instead of one, filled from the same sources, four years apart. Hourly earnings for production workers in manufacturing fell from 56 cents to 44; the working week fell from 44.2 hours to 38.1; and weekly earnings, which is the two multiplied together as the Bureau reported them, fell from $24.76 to $16.65. Annual earnings per full-time manufacturing employee went from $1,543 to $1,086. Those figures describe people who still had the job. The line that describes the others is unemployment, which went from 3.2 per cent to 24.9 per cent, by way of 8.7, 15.9 and 23.6: 12,830 thousand people at the bottom.
That 24.9 deserves its own sentence, because it is not a count. No agency collected labor force data in the early 1930s. The interwar rates are reconstructions built afterwards from census and payroll material, and the one the Census Bureau reprints is Stanley Lebergott’s. Other scholars have rebuilt the same years on a different rule, counting people on federal work relief as employed rather than unemployed, and their series runs materially lower at the trough. The gap between those two answers is a decision about what a relief job was, not a measurement error, and it is worth knowing that the famous figure has a name attached to it. Why boom and bust keeps happening is a chapter; this is a ledger.
Two lines refuse to collapse on cue. Registered motor cars fell for four straight years, from 23,121 thousand to 20,657 thousand, and did not pass the 1929 figure again until 1936. But electricity did something else entirely. The share of dwellings with electric service slipped only from 67.9 to 66.7 per cent nationally while the farm share went the other way, from 9.2 to 11.8 per cent, and use per residential customer stood higher in every year of the slump than it had in 1929, reaching 600 kilowatt-hours by 1933 against 502. The price per kilowatt-hour fell from 6.33 cents to 5.52 at the same time.
Ownership is the line where the collapse shows on the longest delay. It stood at 47.8 per cent in 1930, the highest reading since 1890, and at 43.6 per cent by 1940, lower than any census before it. The 1930 census put the median value of an owned nonfarm home at $4,779, the owner family’s report of approximate current market value; renter families in nonfarm homes reported a median monthly rent of $27.15. That rent does not include a separately estimated utility bill and is not joined to the later gross-rent series. The machinery of mortgage lending — where the money for one comes from — lives in the chapter on where new money actually comes from.
The national accounts open in 1929, which makes this the first panel that can show what was saved. Personal saving was 4.7 per cent of disposable personal income in 1929 and −0.7 per cent in 1933, with 1932 at −0.2. 1932 and 1933 are the only two years in the whole series, which runs to 2025, in which the figure is below zero: the sector spent more than its disposable income. The measure is an accounting residual for households and the nonprofits that serve them, not a survey of what families set aside.
One panel, two anchor years, with every source year printed. The rent and home value are from the 1930 census; the second occupation reading is from 1940; and the second income, housing and budget readings come from the 1934–36 expenditure survey. The unemployment rates for these years are reconstructions rather than a contemporary count, and the ones shown are Lebergott’s as the Census prints them. The hourly earnings and weekly hours for 1929 carry the Census’s own warning that, before 1932, earnings in this series are likely overstated and hours understated, because the surveys behind them sampled large firms more heavily than small ones.
- Out of work the panel exists for this line, and it is the one number the two columns get read for.
- Electric light a documented counter-current inside the collapse.
- Electricity used consumption per customer rose through the slump, which the ownership share on its own would not show.
- Saved out of income the national accounts start in 1929, and this panel’s second column is one of the only two years in which the rate they report is negative.
- Where the money went the wave that follows the crash puts housing at 32.0 per cent of spending, the largest share the lineage records anywhere. 37.8 per cent of families ended the year short, by $203 on average.
The 1929 → 1933 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1929 | 1933 |
|---|---|---|
| The earner and the week | ||
| What the earner does | Farm work, 10,321 of 48,686 thousand in 1930, 21.2% | Operatives, 9,518 of 51,742 thousand in 1940, 18.4% |
| Hours in the working week | 44.2 hours | 38.1 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $1,543 a year; 56 cents an hour | $1,086 a year; 44 cents an hour |
| Out of work | 3.2% | 24.9% |
| What came in | ||
| A family’s income | $2,335 average per consumer unit, Goldsmith’s estimate | $1,524 average, expenditure-survey families, 1934-36 |
| Saved out of income | 4.7% of disposable income | −0.7% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | no expenditure-survey wave, 1918-33 | Food 33.6%, housing 32.0% of $1,512 spent, 1934-36 |
| Insurance | no expenditure-survey wave, 1918-33 | Healthcare, $59 a year, 3.9% |
| The home | ||
| The home | 47.8% owned in 1930 | 43.6% owned in 1940 |
| What a house was worth | $4,779 at the 1930 census | $2,938 at the 1940 census |
| The new house | no floor-area series | no floor-area series |
| Farm and city | Farm 53.9% owned, nonfarm 46.0% in 1930 | Farm 53.2% owned, nonfarm 41.1% in 1940 |
| What the roof cost | $27.15 a month rent in 1930 | $485 a year on housing, 1934-36 |
| Mortgage payment and term | no survey of mortgage terms | no survey of mortgage terms |
| What the house used | ||
| Electric light | 67.9% of dwellings; farm 9.2% | 66.7% of dwellings; farm 11.8% |
| Electricity used | 502 kilowatt-hours a year | 600 kilowatt-hours a year |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 6.33 cents a kilowatt-hour | 5.52 cents a kilowatt-hour |
| The bills | no fuel census yet | no fuel census yet |
| The household and getting about | ||
| Who is in it, who earns | 4.1 people in 1930; 23.6% of women in the labor force | 3.8 people in 1940; 25.8% of women in the labor force |
| In service | 1,909 of 10,752 thousand women at work in 1930, 17.8% | 2,277 of 12,574 thousand women at work in 1940, 18.1% |
| Getting about | 23,121 thousand motor cars registered | 20,657 thousand motor cars registered |
| Trucks on the register | 3,550 thousand trucks registered | 3,457 thousand trucks registered |
| Bought | 1929 | 1933 |
|---|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | 52.7 cents · 56 min | 28.8 cents · 39 min |
| half a gallon of milk, delivered | 28.8 cents · 31 min | 21.4 cents · 29 min |
| a pound of butter | 55.5 cents · 59 min | 27.8 cents · 38 min |
| a pound of round steak | 46 cents · 49 min | 25.7 cents · 35 min |
| a pound of bread | 8.8 cents · 9 min | 7.1 cents · 10 min |
| a gallon of gasoline | not priced | not priced |
| a first-class stamp | 2 cents · 2 min | 3 cents · 4 min |
Era four
1944: the war household
The war put the two halves of the ledger under opposite pressures. Unemployment fell to 1.2 per cent, which is 670 thousand people and the lowest reading in a series that runs from 1890 to 1970. The working week in manufacturing rose to 45.2 hours, the highest figure between 1929 and 1970. Women’s labor force participation reached 36.3 per cent, the highest of the war years. Passenger-car factory sales for the year were 600 vehicles, and registered cars fell below their 1941 level.
Annual earnings per full-time manufacturing employee were $2,517. They were also $2,517 in 1945 and $2,517 in 1946: the same figure three years running, in a stretch when measured prices did not stand still. Hourly earnings were $1.01 and weekly earnings $45.70.
The prices on this panel are the measured retail averages for 1944, and they should be read knowing that measured prices under wartime controls were disputed at the time by people with access to the same data. That argument had a formal life, in hearings and a presidential committee, and it is not settled on this page: the figures shown are what the Bureau published, labelled as such. On why prices move and who decides, the chapter on central banks and the inflation target is the home.
Housing barely appears, because the census that would have measured it did not run. Ownership was 43.6 per cent in 1940, and a sample survey in November 1945 read 53.2 per cent, a figure the Census itself marks as not comparable with the census years. Something large happened to American home ownership in the 1940s, and the instrument that could date it precisely was not in the field.
What the 1940 housing census brings is the first reading on the decennial housing series: $2,938, the median value of an owner-occupied single-family home on under 10 acres. It is not the page’s first home-value reading. The 1930 population census Families volume prints $4,779 for owned nonfarm homes, on a different family-based instrument and universe. Neither figure is a sale, and the ledger does not join them into a trend.
Wartime figures on peacetime constructs. Wages, hours, unemployment and food prices are annual 1944 values. Households and tenure are decennial: the nearest readings are 1940 and a November 1945 sample survey the Census marks as not comparable with the census years. Women’s participation before 1947 is counted on a fourteen-and-over basis; from 1947 the series counts sixteen and over. The home value is the 1940 census reading, on the Bureau’s universe of owner-occupied single-family units on less than 10 acres without a business or medical office on the property; it carries no work-time figure, because a 1940 value divided by a 1944 wage would cross years, which nothing on this page does.
- Out of work 1.2 per cent is the plainest single statement of what the war did to the labor market.
- Electric light the farm gap closes fastest in this decade, and the war years sit in the middle of it: the farm share had been 9.2 per cent in 1929 and was 42.2 per cent now.
- Electricity used use per customer nearly doubled between 1933 and 1944 while the price kept falling.
- Saved out of income 27.9 per cent is the highest reading the series carries; 1943 reads 27.7 and 1942 26.2.
- The bills the first census to ask what the house burned. In 1940, coal or coke heated 54.7 per cent of homes and wood another 22.8, against 11.3 per cent on utility gas.
The 1944 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1944 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Operatives, 9,518 of 51,742 thousand in 1940, 18.4% |
| Hours in the working week | 45.2 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $2,517 a year; $1.01 an hour |
| Out of work | 1.2% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | city families and single persons: $2,700 median, after taxes |
| Saved out of income | 27.9% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | no wartime wave in the lineage |
| Insurance | no wave between 1934-36 and 1950 |
| The home | |
| The home | 43.6% owned in 1940; 53.2% at a November 1945 sample survey |
| What a house was worth | $2,938 at the 1940 census |
| The new house | no floor-area series |
| Farm and city | Farm 53.2% owned, nonfarm 41.1% in 1940 |
| What the roof cost | $27 a month rent in 1940, $42 in 1950 |
| Mortgage payment and term | no survey of mortgage terms |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | 84.0% of dwellings; farm 42.2% |
| Electricity used | 1,151 kilowatt-hours a year |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 3.51 cents a kilowatt-hour |
| The bills | Coal or coke heated 54.7% of homes in 1940; wood 22.8% |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 3.8 people in 1940; 36.3% of women in the labor force |
| In service | 2,277 of 12,574 thousand women at work in 1940, 18.1% |
| Getting about | 25,566 thousand motor cars registered |
| Trucks on the register | 4,760 thousand trucks registered |
| Bought | 1944 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | 54.5 cents · 32 min |
| half a gallon of milk, delivered | 31.2 cents · 19 min |
| a pound of butter | 50 cents · 30 min |
| a pound of round steak | 41.4 cents · 25 min |
| a pound of bread | 8.8 cents · 5 min |
| a gallon of gasoline | not priced |
| a first-class stamp | 3 cents · 2 min |
Era five
1955: the year the story is about
This is the panel the claim points at, so it is worth being exact about what the record holds. Median money income of American families in 1955 was $4,418. The mean was $4,962, and both are printed here because the gap between them is the shape of the distribution. That figure counts families, which the Census defines as two or more related people living together, and there were 42,890 thousand of them. It is not a count of households, and money income is cash before tax, excluding capital gains and anything received in kind. A full-time manufacturing employee earned $4,356 across the year, at $1.86 an hour and $75.70 a week, for 40.7 hours.
Home ownership is the line that carries the era’s reputation, and the record supports the direction without giving a 1955 number: it was 55.0 per cent at the 1950 census and 61.9 per cent at the 1960 one. The rise across the 1940s is the largest decade-on-decade rise in a series that starts in 1890. A December 1956 sample survey reads 60.4 per cent, and the Census marks it as not comparable with the census years, so it sits here as a reading and not as a data point on the line.
The house itself can be described, though not on the series the later panels use: the Census began pricing new-home sales in 1963 and measuring their floor area in 1973. What exists for 1955 is a different survey. The Bureau of Labor Statistics sent field agents to builders that year and reported on the new privately owned nonfarm one-family houses started in the first three months of it: 1,170 square feet of floor area on average, at a median proposed selling price of $13,700 — about 7,366 hours of work at that year’s manufacturing wage. The sample was a stratified one of some 6,000 projects and 37,000 dwelling units across 63 areas, roughly 13 per cent of the private dwelling units started. Every part of that is a different measurement from the Census figures on the later panels: a price proposed when building began rather than a price paid when the house sold, a mean floor area rather than a median, houses started rather than houses completed or sold. The number is here because the panel that carries the claim should not have a blank where its house goes. No line on this page is drawn from it to any other.
The houses already standing are measured, and they are the ones the ledger’s household actually lives in: not the year’s new builds but the whole owner-occupied stock. At the censuses either side of the year, the median value of an owner-occupied single-family home on under 10 acres was $7,354 in 1950 and $11,900 in 1960. That is a different thing again from the builders’ $13,700: it is what the stock of lived-in homes was worth, not what a new one was offered at, and the two are not subtracted, divided or joined anywhere here.
The single-earner half of the claim is where the ledger is least obliging. Women’s labor force participation in 1955 was 35.7 per cent. That is a third of adult women in paid work, in the year the household is remembered as having one wage. It is also below the 36.3 per cent of 1944, though the two readings sit on either side of a change in the age basis, and the series does not pass the wartime figure again until 1956. Whatever 1955 was, it was not a year in which women had stayed out of the labor market. On the paid side of that question the chapter on what explains the pay gap is the home; on the unpaid side, the chapter on why GDP counts a nanny and not a mother.
The basket does not move as one thing. Eggs, butter and milk all cost more money in 1955 than in 1944 and less work. Bread and round steak cost more of both, steak at 90.3 cents against 41.4, and more minutes of work than it had taken in the war year. The unemployment rate that year was 4.4 per cent, or 2,852 thousand people, against 1.2 per cent in 1944 and 4.5 in 1965. And electric service, at 98.4 per cent of dwellings and 94.4 per cent of farm dwellings, had finished the job it started in 1907.
1955 has an annual median family income, annual wages, hours and prices, and no housing census. Tenure and household size are shown at the 1950 and 1960 censuses that bracket the year. Median family income counts families, two or more related people living together, which is a narrower universe than all households, and it is money income before tax. Occupation shares are the bracketing censuses too. The floor area and the price on the home line come from a Bureau of Labor Statistics sample survey of houses started in the first quarter, and are a mean and a median respectively; they are not points on either Census housing series, and neither of those reaches this year.
- Out of work the ordinary background rate of the anchor year, so the panel is not read against a memory of full employment.
- Electric light this is the decade the farm gap closes.
- Electricity used the appliances arrive as kilowatt-hours before they arrive as a list of objects: 2,773 a year against 1,151 in 1944.
- In service private household workers were down to 1,459 of 16,445 thousand women at work by 1950, 8.9 per cent, from 28.7 per cent in 1900. Clerical work, at 4,502 thousand, had taken the top place.
- Saved out of income 9.7 per cent, on the line the panels either side of this one also carry.
- Where the money went at the wave nearest the anchor year, food still took 29.7 per cent of spending and housing 27.2. Food is the larger of the two here. At the next wave it is not, and it never is again.
The 1955 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1955 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Operatives, 12,080 of 58,999 thousand in 1950, 20.5% |
| Hours in the working week | 40.7 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $4,356 a year; $1.86 an hour |
| Out of work | 4.4% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $4,418 median, $4,962 mean |
| Saved out of income | 9.7% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | Food 29.7%, housing 27.2% of $3,808 spent, 1950 |
| Insurance | Healthcare, $197 a year, 5.2% |
| The home | |
| The home | 55.0% owned in 1950, 61.9% in 1960; houses started: 1,170 sq ft average, $13,700 median proposed price |
| What a house was worth | $7,354 in 1950, $11,900 in 1960 |
| The new house | no floor-area series |
| Farm and city | Farm 65.7% owned, nonfarm 53.4% in 1950 |
| What the roof cost | $42 a month rent in 1950, $71 in 1960 |
| Mortgage payment and term | no survey of mortgage terms |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | 98.4% of dwellings; farm 94.4% |
| Electricity used | 2,773 kilowatt-hours a year |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 2.65 cents a kilowatt-hour |
| The bills | Coal or coke heated 34.6% of homes in 1950; utility gas 26.6% |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 3.5 people in 1950, 3.4 in 1960; 35.7% of women in the labor force |
| In service | 1,459 of 16,445 thousand women at work in 1950, 8.9% |
| Getting about | 52,145 thousand motor cars registered |
| Trucks on the register | 10,289 thousand trucks registered |
| Bought | 1955 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | 60.6 cents · 20 min |
| half a gallon of milk, delivered | 46.2 cents · 15 min |
| a pound of butter | 70.9 cents · 23 min |
| a pound of round steak | 90.3 cents · 29 min |
| a pound of bread | 17.7 cents · 6 min |
| a gallon of gasoline, leaded regular | 29.1 cents · 9 min |
| a first-class stamp | 3 cents · 1 min |
Era six
1965: before the turn
Ten years on, median family income was $6,957 and the mean $7,704, across 48,510 thousand families. A full-time manufacturing employee earned $6,389 in the year, at $2.61 an hour and $107.53 a week, for 41.2 hours. Unemployment was 4.5 per cent, against 4.4 in 1955: the ordinary rate moves by a tenth of a point across the decade between the two panels. Whether pay kept pace with what the economy produced, and why it stopped, is the chapter on growth and paychecks; whether the forty-hour week was ever arbitrary is the chapter on the length of the workweek.
The clearest single measure of what came into the house is the meter. 4,933 kilowatt-hours a year per residential customer in 1965, against 2,773 in 1955 and 502 in 1929, at a falling price: 2.25 cents a kilowatt-hour. The house had filled with things that plug in before it had filled with anything the census counted by name. The electric-light line stops before this panel: the dwelling-unit series ends at 1956, where it read 98.8 per cent, and once nearly every dwelling has the service the meter is what is left to measure.
A dozen eggs cost 52.7 cents in 1965. A dozen eggs cost 52.7 cents in 1929. Same source, same unit, same country, thirty-six years apart, and the money price had not moved at all. In work-time the two are not close: just under an hour of a production worker’s pay in 1929, and about a fifth of an hour in 1965. That is the case for keeping both columns on the page, made by a carton of eggs.
The same constructs as 1955: annual wages, hours, prices and median family income, with decennial housing bracketed at 1960 and 1970. Women’s participation is the annual average on a sixteen-and-over basis. The eggs on this panel are the same source and the same unit as the eggs on the 1929 panel, which is why they are priced twice.
- Out of work read against 1955 it shows how little the ordinary rate moved across the decade.
- Electricity used the single clearest measure of what arrived in the house between 1955 and 1965.
- In service the occupation the century moved women out of, against the one it moved them into: private household workers were 1,760 of 22,304 thousand women at work in 1960, and clerical workers 6,497 thousand, 29.1 per cent.
- Saved out of income 11.5 per cent, against 9.7 in 1955: the rate rose across the decade between the two panels.
- Mortgage payment and term the mortgage survey reaches this panel first. Principal and interest on its average loan are $109 a month for 22.6 years at 5.83 per cent — not thirty years. Borrowing $16,400 cost $29,545 to repay if the loan ran its term.
- Where the money went housing passes food. Housing took 29.5 per cent of spending against food’s 24.3, and the lineage’s own compilation names the 1960s as when the two changed places.
The 1965 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1965 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Operatives, 11,754 of 67,990 thousand in 1960, 17.3% |
| Hours in the working week | 41.2 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $6,389 a year; $2.61 an hour |
| Out of work | 4.5% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $6,957 median, $7,704 mean |
| Saved out of income | 11.5% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | Housing 29.5%, food 24.3% of $5,390 spent, 1960-61 |
| Insurance | Healthcare, $355 a year, 6.6% |
| The home | |
| The home | 61.9% owned in 1960, 62.9% in 1970; a new house sold for $20,000 |
| What a house was worth | $11,900 in 1960, $17,000 in 1970 |
| The new house | no floor-area series |
| Farm and city | Farm 73.8% owned, nonfarm 61.0% in 1960 |
| What the roof cost | $71 a month rent in 1960, $108 in 1970 |
| Mortgage payment and term | $109 a month for 22.6 years; $16,400 repaid as $29,545 |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | the column ends at 1956, at 98.8% |
| Electricity used | 4,933 kilowatt-hours a year |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 2.25 cents a kilowatt-hour |
| The bills | Utility gas heated 43.1% of homes in 1960; fuel oil 32.4% |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 3.4 people in 1960, 3.2 in 1970; 39.3% of women in the labor force |
| In service | 1,760 of 22,304 thousand women at work in 1960, 7.9% |
| Getting about | 75,258 thousand motor cars registered |
| Trucks on the register | 14,786 thousand trucks registered |
| Bought | 1965 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | 52.7 cents · 12 min |
| half a gallon of milk, delivered | 52.6 cents · 12 min |
| a pound of butter | 75.4 cents · 17 min |
| a pound of round steak | $1.08 · 25 min |
| a pound of bread | 20.9 cents · 5 min |
| a gallon of gasoline, leaded regular | 31.2 cents · 7 min |
| a first-class stamp | 5 cents · 1 min |
Era seven
1973: the inflection
Two of the lines on this page change instrument here, and it is worth saying so before the numbers. The wage and the hours stop being manufacturing figures and become figures for production and nonsupervisory employees across all private industry, because manufacturing is on its way from 24.2 per cent of nonfarm payroll jobs to under a tenth and a manufacturing wage is a narrower and narrower thing to call an hour of work. The income line changes universe too: from here it counts households rather than families. Both are printed for 1973 so the size of that difference is visible. Median household income was $10,510; median family income was $12,050. The same country, the same year, two definitions.
The working week was 36.9 hours and the week’s earnings $152.71, at $4.14 an hour. A new single-family house sold for a median $32,500, which at that hourly rate is about 7,850 hours of work. Hold that number: it is the one the rest of this page moves against. Whether pay kept pace with what the economy produced, and why the two lines come apart around here, is a chapter and not a ledger line, and this page does not adjudicate the decomposition.
The basket is almost empty on this panel, and the emptiness is a fact about the record rather than about the year. The Bureau’s modern average-price series begin between 1976 and 1980, and the retail food series used for the earlier panels stops in 1970. What can be priced is fuel: a gallon of leaded regular at 38.8 cents, on its way to 53.2 cents the following year.
Wage and hours from here cover production and nonsupervisory employees across all private industry, part-time work included, which is a wider universe than the manufacturing series used to 1965; the join and the years where both series exist are in the method note above. Income counts households, everyone occupying a housing unit, related or not. Home ownership is the Housing Vacancy Survey, not the decennial census used before 1970. New-home prices are for houses sold; floor areas are for houses completed. They are two universes inside one program and no figure here divides one by the other.
- Out of work the modern survey measures directly what the earlier panels could only reconstruct, and 4.9 per cent is the last quiet reading before the decade turns.
- The new house the Census floor-area series begins in 1973, so this is the first panel whose house size sits on the series the panels after it use. The 1955 figure comes from a different survey and is not joined to this one.
- Trucks on the register the vehicle a household buys is about to be reclassified out of the car column, and 1973 is the base that shows it.
- Saved out of income 13.5 per cent at the inflection year; every later panel on this page reads lower.
- Mortgage payment and term principal and interest are $189 a month for 24.0 years. The term is a year and a half longer than 1965 and the rate two points higher; $24,600 borrowed cost $54,482 to repay, of which $29,882 was interest.
- Where the money went housing 30.8 per cent, food 19.3. Transportation now costs the average family about what food costs it.
The 1973 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1973 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Manufacturing, 18,589 of 76,912 thousand nonfarm jobs, 24.2% |
| Hours in the working week | 36.9 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $152.71 a week; $4.14 an hour |
| Out of work | 4.9% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $10,510 median household, $12,050 median family |
| Saved out of income | 13.5% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | Housing 30.8%, food 19.3% of $8,348 spent, 1972-73 |
| Insurance | Healthcare, $528 a year, 6.4% |
| The home | |
| The home | 64.5% owned; a new house sold for $32,500 |
| What a house was worth | $17,000 at the 1970 census |
| The new house | 1,525 square feet |
| Farm and city | Farm 80.5% owned, nonfarm 62.0% in 1970 |
| What the roof cost | $108 a month rent in 1970, $243 in 1980 |
| Mortgage payment and term | $189 a month for 24.0 years; $24,600 repaid as $54,482 |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | the column ends at 1956, at 98.8% |
| Electricity used | 7,066 kilowatt-hours a year, 1970 |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 2.10 cents a kilowatt-hour, 1970 |
| The bills | Utility gas heated 55.2% of homes in 1970; fuel oil 26.0% |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 3.01 people; 44.7% of women in the labor force |
| In service | 1,103 of 30,601 thousand women at work in 1970, 3.6% |
| Getting about | 101,985 thousand automobiles registered |
| Trucks on the register | 23,244 thousand trucks |
| Bought | 1973 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | not priced |
| half a gallon of milk | not priced |
| a pound of butter | not priced |
| a pound of round steak | not priced |
| a pound of bread | not priced |
| a gallon of gasoline, leaded regular | 38.8 cents · 6 min |
| a first-class stamp | 8 cents · 1 min |
Era eight
1985: two earners as the ordinary case
The title of this panel is a claim about families, and it has its own survey: 54.5 per cent of married-couple families had both husband and wife earning during 1985, 27,787 of 50,978 thousand, against 20.4 per cent that ran on the husband’s earnings alone and 43.6 per cent with two earners back in 1967, all on the survey’s earner-during-the-year count. By coincidence, women’s labor force participation reads the same digits: more than half of adult women, 54.5 per cent, were in the labor force by 1985, against 35.7 in 1955 — one construct counts families, the other counts women, and on the family count the two-earner couple was now the majority case. The household they were in had 2.69 people, against 3.5 at the 1950 census and 3.4 at the 1960 one, on the housing-unit count the early panels use, and they married later, at 25.5 and 23.3 against 22.6 and 20.2 thirty years before. Median household income was $23,620 and the mean $29,070, across 88,460 thousand households. On the paid half of that shift the chapter on what explains the pay gap is the home; on the unpaid half, the chapter on why GDP counts a nanny and not a mother.
The basket comes back on this panel, on the Bureau’s modern average-price series, and the first thing it shows is that work-time prices had already fallen a long way. A dozen eggs took 5 minutes of an average private-sector hour in 1985, against 20 minutes in 1955. A pound of bread took 4 minutes against 6. Round steak took 20 minutes against 29, on a cut the Bureau describes differently in the two eras. The house went the other way: $84,300 is about 9,656 hours of work, against 7,850 in 1973.
Unemployment averaged 7.2 per cent, the highest of the six panels from 1973 on.
Prices from here are the Bureau’s average-price series. They are monthly and the file used publishes no annual average, so every price on the modern panels is the June reading of its year, divided by the year’s average hourly earnings. Fuel changes grade here: leaded and unleaded regular both exist in 1985, at $1.115 and $1.202, and unleaded is the one carried forward. Household size comes from a Current Population Survey table, not the housing-unit count used to 1965.
- Out of work the highest reading of the modern panels.
- Electricity, a kilowatt-hour the household’s least visible bill, on a series that runs from here to the present.
- The new house it barely moves between 1973 and 1985: 1,525 square feet to 1,605.
- Trucks on the register 43,210 thousand, against 23,244 thousand twelve years earlier.
- Saved out of income 9.1 per cent, down from 13.5 in 1973: about a third of the rate gone in twelve years.
- Mortgage payment and term the highest average contract rate the survey records at any panel here. Principal and interest are $692 a month; at 11.17 per cent over 25.9 years, $70,200 borrowed cost $215,174 to repay — $144,974 of it interest, against a house priced at $96,100.
The 1985 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1985 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Manufacturing, 17,819 of 97,532 thousand nonfarm jobs, 18.3% |
| Hours in the working week | 34.9 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $304.37 a week; $8.73 an hour |
| Out of work | 7.2% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $23,620 median household, $29,070 mean |
| Saved out of income | 9.1% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | Housing 30.4%, food 15.0% of $21,975 spent, 1984-85 |
| Insurance | Healthcare, $1,049 a year, 4.8% |
| The home | |
| The home | 63.9% owned; a new house sold for $84,300 |
| What a house was worth | $47,200 at the 1980 census |
| The new house | 1,605 square feet |
| Farm and city | the series ends at 1970 |
| What the roof cost | $243 a month rent in 1980, $447 in 1990 |
| Mortgage payment and term | $692 a month for 25.9 years; $70,200 repaid as $215,174 |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | the column ends at 1956, at 98.8% |
| Electricity used | no reading between 1970 and the bill tables |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 8.5 cents |
| The bills | Utility gas heated 53.1% of homes in 1980; electricity 18.4% |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 2.69 people; 54.5% of women in the labor force |
| In service | the census table ends at 1970 |
| Getting about | 127,885 thousand automobiles registered |
| Trucks on the register | 43,210 thousand trucks |
| Bought | 1985 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | 72.4 cents · 5 min |
| half a gallon of milk | $1.14 · 8 min |
| a pound of butter | $2.14 · 15 min |
| a pound of round steak | $2.84 · 20 min |
| a pound of bread | 54.6 cents · 4 min |
| a gallon of gasoline, unleaded regular | $1.20 · 8 min |
| a first-class stamp | 22 cents · 2 min |
Era nine
1995: the house grows, the factory does not
Manufacturing employed 17,241 thousand people in 1995. It had employed 18,589 thousand in 1973. The count is lower in 1995 than in 1973; the payroll it sits in grew from 76,912 to 117,400 thousand jobs, so the share fell from 24.2 per cent to 14.7. That is what a shrinking share looks like from the inside: not a collapse in the numerator, a rise in the denominator.
The new house gained more floor area in this decade than between any other pair of panels on this page, from 1,605 square feet in 1985 to 1,920 in 1995, and its median price of $133,900 is about 11,494 hours of work. Home ownership, meanwhile, sat at 64.7 per cent, within a point of where it had been in 1973. Why homes are unaffordable in rich cities is the chapter that carries the mechanism.
Two lines on this panel cost less money than they had a decade earlier. Gasoline cost $1.147 a gallon in 1995 against $1.202 in 1985: less money, ten years later, and 6 minutes of work against 8. Butter did the same, at $1.553 against $2.138.
The same instruments as 1985. Milk is the item whose unit is about to change: the half-gallon series ends in 1997 and the gallon series begins in 1995, so this is the last panel that prices milk in the unit the 1900 panel used. Women’s participation reaches its highest annual reading in this series four years later, at 60.0 per cent in 1999.
- Out of work 5.6 per cent, read against 7.2 ten years before.
- Electricity, a kilowatt-hour up in money from 8.5 cents to 9.8, and down in work-time.
- The new house the largest gain between two panels on this page.
- Trucks on the register 72,458 thousand, more than half the car column.
- Saved out of income 6.8 per cent, against 9.1 ten years earlier.
- Mortgage payment and term principal and interest are $806 a month for 27.4 years. The rate is three and a half points below 1985 and the loan half again as large, and the two move the total in opposite directions. The loan-to-price ratio, 79.9 per cent, is the highest on this page: the smallest share paid down at the start.
The 1995 ledger, as a table
| Line | 1995 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Manufacturing, 17,241 of 117,400 thousand nonfarm jobs, 14.7% |
| Hours in the working week | 34.3 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $399.93 a week; $11.65 an hour |
| Out of work | 5.6% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $34,080 median household, $44,940 mean |
| Saved out of income | 6.8% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | Housing 32.1%, food 13.8% of $34,312 spent, 1996-97 |
| Insurance | Healthcare, $1,806 a year, 5.3% |
| The home | |
| The home | 64.7% owned; a new house sold for $133,900 |
| What a house was worth | $79,100 at the 1990 census |
| The new house | 1,920 square feet |
| Farm and city | the series ends at 1970 |
| What the roof cost | $447 a month rent in 1990, $602 in 2000 |
| Mortgage payment and term | $806 a month for 27.4 years; $110,400 repaid as $265,068 |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | the column ends at 1956, at 98.8% |
| Electricity used | no reading between 1970 and the bill tables |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 9.8 cents |
| The bills | Utility gas heated 51.0% of homes in 1990; electricity 25.8% |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 2.65 people; 58.9% of women in the labor force |
| In service | the census table ends at 1970 |
| Getting about | 128,387 thousand automobiles registered |
| Trucks on the register | 72,458 thousand trucks |
| Bought | 1995 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | 82.5 cents · 4 min |
| half a gallon of milk | $1.42 · 7 min |
| a pound of butter | $1.55 · 8 min |
| a pound of round steak | $3.14 · 16 min |
| a pound of bread | 78.1 cents · 4 min |
| a gallon of gasoline, unleaded regular | $1.15 · 6 min |
| a first-class stamp | 32 cents · 2 min |
Era ten
2005: the housing-boom household
Home ownership stood at 69.0 per cent in 2004 and 68.8 in 2006, the two years the annual table brackets this panel with, and the highest readings this page carries. The median new house sold for $240,900, about 14,953 hours of work, which is the largest figure the whole page carries. Median household income was $46,330, the mean $63,340, and the working week 33.8 hours at $16.11.
Nothing on this panel announces what is about to happen to those ownership numbers, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What it can show is the ledger as it stood: a household of 2.57 people, 59.3 per cent of women in the labor force, and a manufacturing share of nonfarm jobs down to 10.6 per cent. On what a mortgage is and where the money for one comes from, the chapter on where new money actually comes from carries the machinery; on why the house under it costs what it does, the housing chapter.
Personal saving was 2.2 per cent of disposable personal income in 2005, the lowest annual reading the series has recorded since 1934: every year from 1935 to 2004 is above it. It is an accounting residual for households and the nonprofits that serve them, not a survey of what families put by.
The register carried 136,568 thousand automobiles in 2005 and 103,819 thousand trucks. The automobile column is the larger of the two here, as it is on every earlier panel that carries both; on the 2015 panel it is not.
Milk changes unit on this panel, from the half gallon every earlier panel priced to the gallon. The two are not divided into each other anywhere on this page, and the basket table says which is which.
Home ownership is shown at 2004 and 2006, in the same bracketing idiom the early panels use for census years. Prices are June readings. The vehicle counts are the 2005 edition of the Federal Highway Administration’s annual table, read for its own data year as the 2015 and 2025 panels’ counts are, and they are the table’s totals, private and commercial plus publicly owned. What a house was worth changes instrument here: the decennial home-value series ends at the 2000 census and the American Community Survey takes the subject up at this panel, on a wider universe — all owner-occupied units, against the census series’ single-family units on under 10 acres. Both readings are printed on the line and no arrow is drawn between them.
- Out of work 5.1 per cent, an ordinary number at the top of a boom.
- Saved out of income 2.2 per cent, the lowest reading the series has recorded since 1934.
- The new house 2,227 square feet, and the price and the size move together.
- Trucks on the register 103,819 thousand against 136,568 thousand automobiles: the two columns the way round they are on every earlier panel that carries both.
- The bills the first panel on which the bill itself is published rather than inferred from a price: $88.60 a month across 120,760,839 customers, at 9.45 cents a kilowatt-hour.
- Mortgage payment and term principal and interest are $1,275 a month for the longest average term the survey records, 28.5 years. $211,900 borrowed cost $435,909 to repay if carried to term.
The 2005 ledger, as a table
| Line | 2005 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Manufacturing, 14,225 of 134,033 thousand nonfarm jobs, 10.6% |
| Hours in the working week | 33.8 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $543.91 a week; $16.11 an hour |
| Out of work | 5.1% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $46,330 median household, $63,340 mean |
| Saved out of income | 2.2% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | Housing 32.8%, food 13.1% of $40,748 spent, 2002-03 |
| Insurance | Healthcare, $2,384 a year, 5.9% |
| The home | |
| The home | 69.0% owned in 2004, 68.8% in 2006; a new house sold for $240,900 |
| What a house was worth | $119,600 in 2000; $167,500 on the 2005 survey |
| The new house | 2,227 square feet |
| Farm and city | the series ends at 1970 |
| What the roof cost | Rent $728 a month; owner with a mortgage $1,295 |
| Mortgage payment and term | $1,275 a month for 28.5 years; $211,900 repaid as $435,909 |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | the column ends at 1956, at 98.8% |
| Electricity used | 938 kilowatt-hours a month |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 9.45 cents a kilowatt-hour |
| The bills | $88.60 a month for electricity; 938 kilowatt-hours |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 2.57 people; 59.3% of women in the labor force |
| In service | the census table ends at 1970 |
| Getting about | 136,568 thousand automobiles registered |
| Trucks on the register | 103,819 thousand trucks |
| Bought | 2005 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | $1.14 · 4 min |
| a gallon of milk | $3.12 · 12 min |
| a pound of butter | $3.11 · 12 min |
| a pound of round steak | $4.15 · 15 min |
| a pound of bread | $1.09 · 4 min |
| a gallon of gasoline, unleaded regular | $2.29 · 9 min |
| a first-class stamp | 37 cents · 1 min |
Era eleven
2015: the post-crisis ledger
Home ownership was 63.7 per cent, lower than 1973’s 64.5 and the lowest of the Housing Vacancy Survey readings this page carries; the pre-1970 panels sit on a different instrument. Median household income was $56,520. The working week was 33.7 hours at $21.03, and the median new house sold for $294,200, about 13,990 hours of work.
The two vehicle columns have swapped places: 141,256 thousand trucks against 112,864 thousand automobiles. On the 2005 panel it was 103,819 thousand against 136,568 thousand the other way, and in 1973 the same table read 23,244 thousand trucks against 101,985 thousand automobiles. The crossing happened somewhere between the 2005 panel and this one, and this page names no year for it: at the 2012 data year the table itself moves roughly fourteen million vehicles from one column to the other with no footnote announcing it, and that break sits inside the gap. Nothing in the pair says households stopped buying cars either. It says the vehicle they buy is now registered in the other column, and a car count on its own would read as a decline that did not happen.
One caution rides every income sentence that crosses this decade. The household survey was redesigned in 2013 and its table prints two figures for that year, $51,940 on the old questionnaire and $53,590 on the new, a gap that is a change in the instrument rather than a change in the country. Butter has no price at all on this panel: the series used ran to 2012 and its replacement begins in 2018.
The 2013 redesign sits between this panel’s income figure and the 2005 one. Prices are June readings, one of them missing for want of a series. Women’s participation, at 56.7 per cent, is below its 1999 reading of 60.0. A second seam runs under the home-value line: the survey reworded its value question in 2008 and replaced its pre-coded answers with a write-in box, and the Bureau’s own content test found the change may introduce an inconsistency in the data between 2007 and 2008. This panel’s reading and the 2005 one sit on either side of it.
- Out of work 5.3 per cent: above 2005, below 1985.
- Saved out of income 5.8 per cent, against 2.2 at the top of the boom ten years earlier.
- The new house 2,467 square feet, the largest median this page carries.
- Trucks on the register the truck column passed the automobile column between this panel and 2005, with the table’s own classification break inside the gap.
- The bills the bill is up a quarter on 2005 while the average customer uses 37 fewer kilowatt-hours a month. The bill and the meter move opposite ways.
- Mortgage payment and term principal and interest are $1,500 a month for 28.4 years, at the lowest average rate the survey records, 3.88 per cent, against the largest average loan. Interest comes to 65 per cent of the sum borrowed, where in 1985 it came to 207.
The 2015 ledger, as a table
| Line | 2015 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Manufacturing, 12,309 of 141,825 thousand nonfarm jobs, 8.7% |
| Hours in the working week | 33.7 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $708.73 a week; $21.03 an hour |
| Out of work | 5.3% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $56,520 median household, $79,260 mean |
| Saved out of income | 5.8% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | Housing 32.9%, food 12.5% of $55,978 spent, 2015 |
| Insurance | Health insurance $2,977 a year; vehicle insurance $1,079 |
| The home | |
| The home | 63.7% owned; a new house sold for $294,200 |
| What a house was worth | $194,500 on the 2015 survey |
| The new house | 2,467 square feet |
| Farm and city | the series ends at 1970 |
| What the roof cost | Rent $959 a month; owner with a mortgage $1,477 |
| Mortgage payment and term | $1,500 a month for 28.4 years; $309,543 repaid as $511,247 |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | the column ends at 1956, at 98.8% |
| Electricity used | 901 kilowatt-hours a month |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 12.65 cents a kilowatt-hour |
| The bills | $114.03 a month for electricity; 901 kilowatt-hours |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 2.54 people; 56.7% of women in the labor force |
| In service | the census table ends at 1970 |
| Getting about | 112,864 thousand automobiles registered |
| Trucks on the register | 141,256 thousand trucks |
| Bought | 2015 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | $2.57 · 7 min |
| a gallon of milk | $3.37 · 10 min |
| a pound of butter | not priced |
| a pound of round steak | $6.18 · 18 min |
| a pound of bread | $1.47 · 4 min |
| a gallon of gasoline, unleaded regular | $2.45 · 7 min |
| a first-class stamp | 49 cents · 1 min |
Era twelve
2025: the ledger today
An hour of an average private-sector production or nonsupervisory job paid $31.35 in 2025, for a week of 33.7 hours and $1,055.51. The most recent median household income the Census has published is $83,730 for 2024, with a mean of $121,000. Home ownership was 65.6 per cent in 2024: one point above 1973.
Every value on this panel is dated on the line, because a page that pretends all its sources reach 2025 would be filling the record in rather than reporting it. The panel’s year is 2025: the wage and hours are 2025 annual averages, and the prices and labor-force rates are June 2025 readings. The series that publish on a longer lag carry their most recent year instead: incomes, home ownership and the home value are 2024, and the vehicle counts are 2024. Nothing here is projected forward. This page carries no forecast of any kind.
The basket in work-time reads: a dozen eggs, 7 minutes; a pound of bread, 4; a pound of round steak, 16; a gallon of gasoline, 6; a first-class stamp, about a minute. Against 1955 the same items, where the units match, read 20, 6, 29 and 9 minutes. The house reads 13,314 hours of work in 2025 against 7,663 in 1965, the earliest panel the sales-price series reaches. Both of those things are true at once, and the verdict below is about what follows from that.
Mixed vintages, each named on its line. The wage and hours are 2025 annual averages; the prices, the unemployment rate and women’s participation are June 2025, on the not-seasonally-adjusted basis the earlier panels’ annual averages use; income and home ownership are 2024; the new-home sales price is 2025 and the registration counts are 2024. Butter is priced on a different series from the one used through 2005.
- Out of work 4.4 per cent in June, not seasonally adjusted like every reading on this line; adjusted, June reads 4.1, and the 2024 annual average was 4.0.
- Saved out of income 4.6 per cent for 2025, published on 30 July 2026; 2024 reads 5.4.
- The new house 2,142 square feet, smaller than the 2,467 of 2015.
- The bills $142.26 a month across 143,144,185 customers, the average one using 863 kilowatt-hours where in 2005 they used 938.
- Where the money went housing takes a third of what the household spends and food an eighth. In 1901 food took two-fifths and housing under a quarter.
- Insurance health insurance $4,055 a year and vehicle insurance $1,993 — the first panel on this page at which the premium is counted apart from the care it buys.
The 2025 ledger, as a table
| Line | 2025 |
|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |
| What the earner does | Manufacturing, 12,707 of 160,256 thousand nonfarm jobs, 7.9% |
| Hours in the working week | 33.7 hours |
| A year’s earnings | $1,055.51 a week; $31.35 an hour |
| Out of work | 4.4% |
| What came in | |
| A family’s income | $83,730 median household in 2024, $121,000 mean |
| Saved out of income | 4.6% of disposable income |
| Where the money went | Housing 33.4%, food 12.9% of $78,535 spent, 2024 |
| Insurance | Health insurance $4,055 a year; vehicle insurance $1,993 |
| The home | |
| The home | 65.6% owned in 2024; a new house sold for $417,400 in 2025 |
| What a house was worth | $360,600 on the 2024 survey |
| The new house | 2,142 square feet |
| Farm and city | the series ends at 1970 |
| What the roof cost | Rent $1,487 a month; owner with a mortgage $2,035 |
| Mortgage payment and term | the survey was discontinued in 2019 |
| What the house used | |
| Electric light | the column ends at 1956, at 98.8% |
| Electricity used | 863 kilowatt-hours a month |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hour | 16.48 cents a kilowatt-hour |
| The bills | $142.26 a month for electricity; 863 kilowatt-hours |
| The household and getting about | |
| Who is in it, who earns | 2.50 people; 57.2% of women in the labor force |
| In service | the census table ends at 1970 |
| Getting about | 97,413 thousand automobiles registered in 2024 |
| Trucks on the register | 189,755 thousand trucks |
| Bought | 2025 |
|---|---|
| a dozen eggs | $3.77 · 7 min |
| a gallon of milk | $4.03 · 8 min |
| a pound of butter | $4.87 · 9 min |
| a pound of round steak | $8.46 · 16 min |
| a pound of bread | $1.86 · 4 min |
| a gallon of gasoline, unleaded regular | $3.26 · 6 min |
| a first-class stamp | 78 cents · 1 min |
A single paycheck used to buy what two cannot now: the mid-century family had it better.
Oversimplified Moderate confidence
There is a real thing inside this claim, and the ledger finds it in one place: the house. A median new house cost about 7,663 hours of work at the 1965 wage and about 13,314 at the 2025 one. Nothing else this page prices in hours of work moves that way. Alongside that, home ownership in 2024 was 65.6 per cent against 64.5 in 1973: fifty-one years, one point. In between, the two-earner married couple became the majority case — 54.5 per cent of married-couple families by 1985, against 43.6 in 1967, on the earner-in-the-year count — and women’s labor force participation went from 35.7 per cent in 1955 to 57.2 in June 2025. More earners per family, an ownership rate that moved one point, and a house that costs about three-quarters more work than it did in 1965: that is the claim’s documented core.
The rest of the priced record runs the other way. Where the units match, the same basket in hours of work reads: a dozen eggs 20 minutes in 1955 and 7 in 2025; a pound of bread 6 and 4; a pound of round steak 29 and 16; a gallon of gasoline 9 and 6. Go back to 1900 and the gap is not a matter of minutes: a pound of butter took 1 hour and 43 minutes of a manufacturing hour then and 9 minutes of a private-sector hour now. The measured week reads 40.7 hours in 1955 and 33.7 in 2025, but those sit on the two instruments named in the method note — manufacturing then, all private industry with its part-time jobs now — and within the modern series alone the week fell from 36.9 hours in 1973 to 33.7. The new house that costs about three-quarters more work is also larger: 2,142 square feet in 2025 and 2,467 in 2015, against 1,525 when the Census floor-area series opens in 1973. Neither Census housing series reaches 1955. What the anchor panel carries instead is a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of new nonfarm one-family houses started in the first quarter of that year: an average of 1,170 square feet at a median proposed selling price of $13,700, which is about 7,366 hours at the 1955 wage. That is a mean of floor areas and a median of prices proposed at the start of building, on an instrument of its own; it is not a point on the Census line of medians for houses completed, nor on the Census line of prices for houses sold, and this verdict rests on neither reading of it.
Two further things belong on the record before a reader rules. The first is that the single-earner mid-century household is partly an artefact of which average is quoted: 35.7 per cent of women were already in the labor force in 1955, which is below the wartime 36.3 of 1944 and far above the 20.0 of 1900. The second is that the 1955 household this page can describe is a household of 3.5 to 3.4 people in an era when 55.0 to 61.9 per cent of homes were owned and 4.4 per cent of the labor force was out of work.
So the claim is not false and it is not right. Something specific did get harder, and it is the largest single price on this page. Almost everything else this page prices got cheaper in work-time. A sentence that compresses those two findings into “they had it better” is doing the compression, not the record.
Sources
- The house in hours: median sales price of new single-family houses sold, U.S. Census Bureau, New Residential Sales, divided by average hourly earnings for the same year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, series CEU0500000008 from 1973; the 1965 figure uses the manufacturing series that panel is priced on). The division is this page’s own method, stated in the method note.
- Home ownership: Census Housing Vacancy Survey, Table 14. The 1955 readings are the decennial census series, which is a different instrument and is not joined to it.
- Women’s participation: Bureau of Labor Statistics series LNU01300002 for 1955 onward as printed in the panels, and the Census reprint of the historical labor-force table for 1900 and 1944, on a fourteen-and-over basis before 1947.
- The basket: Bureau of Labor Statistics retail food prices as reprinted by the Census for 1900 to 1965, and the Bureau’s average-price series (June readings) from 1985; gasoline from the Energy Information Administration’s Monthly Energy Review, Table 9.4. Where a unit or a product description changes, the panels say so and no figure crosses the change.
- The 1955 house: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 1231, New Housing and Its Materials 1940–56, Tables 1 and 8: average floor area and median proposed selling price of new privately owned nonfarm one-family houses started in the first quarter of 1955, from a stratified sample of some 6,000 projects and 37,000 dwelling units in 63 areas. A mean of areas and a median of prices proposed at the start of building; not a point on the Census median-of-completions series nor on the Census series of prices for houses sold, and never joined to either.
- Two-earner families: Bureau of Labor Statistics, married-couple families by number and relationship of earners, 1967–2007, from the Current Population Survey annual demographic supplement: both husband and wife with earnings at any time during the year. An earner-in-the-year count of married-couple families, which is not the share of all households with two earners, and a different construct from the both-spouses-employed share the Bureau publishes today.
- Why the confidence is moderate and not high: the evidence is direct, but the claim is about a household’s whole command over its life and the record here prices a short basket, one housing indicator and one wage construct. The wage is an average for production and nonsupervisory employees, not household income, and the basket carries nothing for health care, education or child care. Construct-match is the binding constraint.
Where every number came from
- Wages, hours, earnings, occupations, unemployment, women’s participation, households, tenure, food prices, electricity and motor cars: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Bicentennial Edition), Parts 1 and 2. Series used: D 29–41, D 85–86, D 182–232, D 739–764, D 765–778, D 802–810, E 187–202, N 238–245, Q 148–162 and S 108–119. Retrieved 30 July 2026; D 182–232, N 238–245, Q 148–162 and S 108–119 re-read at the plates on 2 August 2026, when the lines they carry were extended to every panel. Four of those columns stop before the page does: the dwelling-unit electrification columns at 1956, use per customer and the farm-and-city tenure split at 1970, and the occupation table at the 1970 census. Where a column stops, the panel says so and prints nothing else.
- Median and mean family income: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Income Tables: Families, Table F-5, released with the 2025 Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement. Families as of March of the following year; money income before tax, excluding capital gains and noncash benefits. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- Median age at first marriage: U.S. Census Bureau, Table MS-2, Estimated Median Age at First Marriage, by Sex: 1890 to Present, internet release December 2025. The Bureau labels the whole series estimated, and it prints no values between census years before 1947. Retrieved 30 July 2026.
- Wages, hours, weekly earnings and payroll employment from 1973: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics, series CEU0500000008, CEU0500000007, CEU0500000030, CEU0000000001 and CEU3000000001. Unemployment and women’s participation from 1973: Current Population Survey, series LNU04000000 and LNU01300002. Retrieved 31 July 2026.
- Prices from 1985: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Average Price Data, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted. Monthly series with no annual average in the files used, so each value is the June reading of its year. Gasoline: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review, Table 9.4, annual averages, leaded regular to the 1980s and unleaded regular after. Postage: United States Postal Service, Office of the Historian, Rates for Domestic Letters Since 1863. Retrieved 31 July 2026.
- Household income, household size, home ownership, new-home prices and floor areas: U.S. Census Bureau — Historical Income Tables Table H-5, Table HH-6, Housing Vacancy Survey Table 14, New Residential Sales, and Characteristics of New Housing. Vehicle registrations: Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics, Tables MV-200 and MV-1. Retrieved 31 July 2026.
- What a house was worth: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census: 1930, Population, Volume VI, Families, Table 26, for the $4,779 median value of owned nonfarm homes; the 1900/1910 census ownership chapter and the 1920 mortgage monograph for the documented earlier limits; U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Census of Housing Tables, Home Values (“Median Home Values: Unadjusted”) for 1940 to 2000, whose universe is owner-occupied single-family housing units on less than 10 acres without a business or medical office on the property; and American Community Survey 1-year table B25077 for 2005, 2015 and 2024, whose universe is all owner-occupied housing units and whose figure is the owner’s own estimate of what the property would sell for. Three instruments on three universes; the 1930 reading stands alone, and the panels print the later two at 2005 and join neither to the other. Retrieved 1–2 August 2026.
- What the roof cost: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census: 1930, Population, Volume VI, Families, Table 26, for the $27.15 median monthly rental of rented nonfarm homes; U.S. Census Bureau — Historical Census of Housing Tables, Gross Rents (“Median Gross Rents: Unadjusted”) for 1940 to 2000, and American Community Survey 1-year tables B25064 (median gross rent, universe renter-occupied units paying cash rent) and B25088 (median selected monthly owner costs by mortgage status, universe owner-occupied units). Gross rent and selected monthly owner costs both already include utilities and fuels by the Bureau’s own definition, which is why no figure on this page adds either of them to the bill line. Retrieved 1 August 2026.
- Mortgage payment and term: Federal Housing Finance Agency, Monthly Interest Rate Survey, Table 9, annual national averages on conventional single-family mortgages closed in the year. Monthly principal-and-interest payments and repayment totals are this page’s amortisation of the survey’s average loan, rate and term; they exclude taxes, insurance, utilities and fees. The survey ran from 1963 and was discontinued in 2019. The 2025 rate is Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey, an offered rate on one product and never joined to the FHFA series. The calculations assume the loan runs its full term, which mortgages commonly do not. Retrieved 1 August 2026.
- The bills: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Census of Housing Tables, House Heating Fuel; and U.S. Energy Information Administration, Form EIA-861, Table 5.A, Average Monthly Bill — Residential, whose annual archive begins in 2002. The bill is the issuer’s published figure, not a price multiplied by a quantity here. Retrieved 1 August 2026.
- Electricity used, and the price of a kilowatt-hour: three instruments, never drawn as one line. The Census’s Historical Statistics columns S 108 (use per residential customer, a year’s kilowatt-hours) and S 116 (average price, all consumption) carry the panels to 1970, where both stop; the Bureau of Labor Statistics average-price series (June readings) carries 1985 and 1995; and Form EIA-861 carries the price and a MONTH’s use per customer from 2005. Between 1970 and the EIA-861 tables there is no reading of use per customer at all: the Energy Information Administration’s Electric Sales and Revenue for those years provides, in its own words, “electricity sales, associated revenue, average revenue per kilowatthour sold, and number of consumers” — and this page does not divide the first by the last. The 1985 and 1995 panels print that gap. Retrieved 2 August 2026.
- Where the money went, and insurance: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report 991, 100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending (2006), for the waves from 1901 to 2002, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey for the two panels the compilation does not reach — Table 1702 for 2015 and Table 1710 for 2024. The 2015 table publishes its own percentage shares and the 2024 one does not, so the 2015 shares are the Bureau’s and the 2025 panel’s are computed here and labelled as such. The lineage itself has no wartime wave: it runs 1934–36 straight to 1950, and the 1944 panel prints that. The populations differ across waves — 1901 covers families of urban wage workers and salaried people, the modern survey all consumer units — and every share is a share of mean expenditures, never of a median household’s. Retrieved 1 August 2026.
- The 1955 floor area and house price: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 1231, New Housing and Its Materials 1940–56 (1958), Tables 1 and 8, as scanned by FRASER. Houses started in the first quarter of 1955; a mean area and a median proposed price, on neither of the Census housing series used for the later panels. Retrieved 31 July 2026.
- Saved out of income: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Table 2.1, line 35, personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income, annual, as published 30 July 2026. The personal sector is households together with the nonprofit institutions that serve them, and the figure is a residual in an accounting identity rather than a survey of households. Retrieved 31 July 2026.
- The Ford five-dollar day: Daniel M. G. Raff and Lawrence H. Summers, Did Henry Ford Pay Efficiency Wages?, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 2101, December 1986. Scholarship rather than a statistical series; the estimates of how many workers qualified are attributed in the paper to sources that disagree. Retrieved 31 July 2026.
- Percentage shares marked as computed are ratios of two rows of the same table, taken from the source named on the line. Work-time figures are computed on this page as the printed price divided by the printed hourly wage of the same year, and nothing else.
Appendix: the whole ledger at once
Every line, every panel, in one grid. It is a finding aid and not a reading: each figure below is an abbreviation of the cell it links to, and the population, the survey and the year that govern it are on the panel. What the grid is for is the shape — where a series starts, where it stops, and how many of these lines the record simply does not carry at either end. The priced basket is not abbreviated here; it has its own table on every panel.
| Line | 1900 | 1915 | 1929 | 1933 | 1944 | 1955 | 1965 | 1973 | 1985 | 1995 | 2005 | 2015 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The earner and the week | |||||||||||||
| What the earner doesthe census’s own largest group, on a classification that changes | Farm work 37.5% | Farm work 30.9% (1910) | Farm work 21.2% (1930) | Operatives 18.4% (1940) | Operatives 18.4% (1940) | Operatives 20.5% (1950) | Operatives 17.3% (1960) | Manufacturing 24.2% | Manufacturing 18.3% | Manufacturing 14.7% | Manufacturing 10.6% | Manufacturing 8.7% | Manufacturing 7.9% |
| Hours in the working weekan average, in one industry, and the industry changes at 1973 | 62.1 hours | 58.2 hours | 44.2 hours | 38.1 hours | 45.2 hours | 40.7 hours | 41.2 hours | 36.9 hours | 34.9 hours | 34.3 hours | 33.8 hours | 33.7 hours | 33.7 hours |
| A year’s earningsper worker, not per household; the series splices twice | $487 a year | $661 a year | $1,543 a year | $1,086 a year | $2,517 a year | $4,356 a year | $6,389 a year | $152.71 a week | $304.37 a week | $399.93 a week | $543.91 a week | $708.73 a week | $1,055.51 a week |
| Out of workpercent of the labor force; the interwar readings are estimates | 5.0% | 8.5% | 3.2% | 24.9% | 1.2% | 4.4% | 4.5% | 4.9% | 7.2% | 5.6% | 5.1% | 5.3% | 4.4% |
| What came in | |||||||||||||
| A family’s incomethe survey population changes at nearly every panel | $749.50 average (1901) | $1,518 average (1918-19) | $2,335 average | $1,524 average (1934-36) | $2,700 median, after taxes | $4,418 median | $6,957 median | $10,510 median household | $23,620 median household | $34,080 median household | $46,330 median household | $56,520 median household | $83,730 median household (2024) |
| Saved out of incomean accounting residual, not a survey of what families set aside | no series yet | no series yet | 4.7% of disposable income | −0.7% of disposable income | 27.9% of disposable income | 9.7% of disposable income | 11.5% of disposable income | 13.5% of disposable income | 9.1% of disposable income | 6.8% of disposable income | 2.2% of disposable income | 5.8% of disposable income | 4.6% of disposable income |
| Where the money wentshares of what was SPENT, not of income | Housing 23.3% · food 42.5% | Housing 23.3% · food 38.2% | no wave, 1918-33 | Housing 32.0% · food 33.6% | no wartime wave in the lineage | Housing 27.2% · food 29.7% | Housing 29.5% · food 24.3% | Housing 30.8% · food 19.3% | Housing 30.4% · food 15.0% | Housing 32.1% · food 13.8% | Housing 32.8% · food 13.1% | Housing 32.9% · food 12.5% | Housing 33.4% · food 12.9% |
| Insurancethe surveys’ own category, relabelled twice across the page | Healthcare + insurance $40 | no healthcare row in this wave | no wave, 1918-33 | Healthcare $59 | no wave, 1934-36 to 1950 | Healthcare $197 | Healthcare $355 | Healthcare $528 | Healthcare $1,049 | Healthcare $1,806 | Healthcare $2,384 | Health ins. $2,977 · vehicle $1,079 | Health ins. $4,055 · vehicle $1,993 |
| The home | |||||||||||||
| The homeowner-occupied as a percent of occupied units | 46.7% owned | 45.9% owned (1910) | 47.8% owned (1930) | 43.6% owned (1940) | 43.6% owned (1940) | 55.0% owned (1950) | 61.9% owned (1960) | 64.5% owned | 63.9% owned | 64.7% owned | 69.0% owned (2004) | 63.7% owned | 65.6% owned (2024) |
| What a house was wortha value, never a sale; the instrument changes at 2005 | no national value collected | no national value collected | $4,779 at the 1930 census | $2,938 at the 1940 census | $2,938 at the 1940 census | $7,354 (1950) | $11,900 (1960) | $17,000 at the 1970 census | $47,200 at the 1980 census | $79,100 at the 1990 census | $119,600 (2000) · $167,500 (2005) | $194,500 on the 2015 survey | $360,600 on the 2024 survey |
| The new housea house just built, not the house lived in | no floor-area series | no floor-area series | no floor-area series | no floor-area series | no floor-area series | no floor-area series | no floor-area series | 1,525 square feet | 1,605 square feet | 1,920 square feet | 2,227 square feet | 2,467 square feet | 2,142 square feet |
| Farm and citythe split does not add to the total, on the table’s own note | Farm 64.4% · city 36.5% | Farm 62.8% · city 38.4% (1910) | Farm 53.9% · city 46.0% (1930) | Farm 53.2% · city 41.1% (1940) | Farm 53.2% · city 41.1% (1940) | Farm 65.7% · city 53.4% (1950) | Farm 73.8% · city 61.0% (1960) | Farm 80.5% · city 62.0% (1970) | the series ends at 1970 | the series ends at 1970 | the series ends at 1970 | the series ends at 1970 | the series ends at 1970 |
| What the roof costalready contains the utilities; never added to the bill line | $179 a year (1901) | $334 a year (1918-19) | $27.15 a month rent in 1930 | $485 a year (1934-36) | Rent $27 a month (1940) | Rent $42 a month (1950) | Rent $71 a month (1960) | Rent $108 a month (1970) | Rent $243 a month (1980) | Rent $447 a month (1990) | Rent $728 · owner $1,295 | Rent $959 · owner $1,477 | Rent $1,487 · owner $2,035 |
| Mortgage payment and termaverages of loans MADE; a term is a contract, not a life | no survey of mortgage terms | no survey of mortgage terms | no survey of mortgage terms | no survey of mortgage terms | no survey of mortgage terms | no survey of mortgage terms | $109 a month, 22.6 years | $189 a month, 24.0 years | $692 a month, 25.9 years | $806 a month, 27.4 years | $1,275 a month, 28.5 years | $1,500 a month, 28.4 years | survey ended 2019 |
| What the house used | |||||||||||||
| Electric lightpercent of dwellings; the column stops at 1956 | 8.0% of dwellings, 1907 | 15.9% of dwellings, 1912 | 67.9% of dwellings; farm 9.2% | 66.7% of dwellings; farm 11.8% | 84.0% of dwellings; farm 42.2% | 98.4% of dwellings; farm 94.4% | series ends 1956, 98.8% | series ends 1956, 98.8% | series ends 1956, 98.8% | series ends 1956, 98.8% | series ends 1956, 98.8% | series ends 1956, 98.8% | series ends 1956, 98.8% |
| Electricity usedper customer, and the unit changes from a year to a month | the meter column is blank | 264 kWh a year (1912) | 502 kWh a year | 600 kWh a year | 1,151 kWh a year | 2,773 kWh a year | 4,933 kWh a year | 7,066 kWh a year (1970) | no reading after 1970 | no reading after 1970 | 938 kWh a month | 901 kWh a month | 863 kWh a month |
| Electricity, a kilowatt-hourthree instruments across the row, and no line between them | 16.2 cents (1902) | 9.10 cents (1912) | 6.33 cents | 5.52 cents | 3.51 cents | 2.65 cents | 2.25 cents | 2.10 cents (1970) | 8.5 cents | 9.8 cents | 9.45 cents | 12.65 cents | 16.48 cents |
| The billswhat the house BURNED until 1990, what it PAID after | no fuel census yet | no fuel census yet | no fuel census yet | no fuel census yet | Coal 54.7% (1940) | Coal 34.6% (1950) | Gas 43.1% (1960) | Gas 55.2% (1970) | Gas 53.1% (1980) | Gas 51.0% (1990) | $88.60 a month | $114.03 a month | $142.26 a month |
| The household and getting about | |||||||||||||
| Who is in it, who earnspersons per occupied unit; the women’s basis shifts | 4.8 people · women 20.0% | 4.5 people (1910) | 4.1 people (1930) · women 23.6% | 3.8 people (1940) · women 25.8% | 3.8 people (1940) · women 36.3% | 3.5 people (1950) · women 35.7% | 3.4 people (1960) · women 39.3% | 3.01 people · women 44.7% | 2.69 people · women 54.5% | 2.65 people · women 58.9% | 2.57 people · women 59.3% | 2.54 people · women 56.7% | 2.50 people · women 57.2% |
| In servicewomen in private household work, as a share of women at work | 28.7% of women at work | 24.0% of women at work (1910) | 17.8% of women at work (1930) | 18.1% of women at work (1940) | 18.1% of women at work (1940) | 8.9% of women at work (1950) | 7.9% of women at work (1960) | 3.6% of women at work (1970) | the census table ends at 1970 | the census table ends at 1970 | the census table ends at 1970 | the census table ends at 1970 | the census table ends at 1970 |
| Getting aboutvehicles registered, not households owning one | 8 thousand cars | 2,332 thousand cars | 23,121 thousand cars | 20,657 thousand cars | 25,566 thousand cars | 52,145 thousand cars | 75,258 thousand cars | 101,985 thousand cars | 127,885 thousand cars | 128,387 thousand cars | 136,568 thousand cars | 112,864 thousand cars | 97,413 thousand cars (2024) |
| Trucks on the registerthe classification breaks at the 2012 data year | none on the register | 159 thousand trucks | 3,550 thousand trucks | 3,457 thousand trucks | 4,760 thousand trucks | 10,289 thousand trucks | 14,786 thousand trucks | 23,244 thousand trucks | 43,210 thousand trucks | 72,458 thousand trucks | 103,819 thousand trucks | 141,256 thousand trucks | 189,755 thousand trucks |