If you’re not in one of New York City’s top tax brackets, good luck to you.
New York is even more unequal today than it was before the pandemic, according to a new report set to be released on Wednesday by Mark Levine, the city’s comptroller. More and more of the city’s wealth is concentrated among a tiny sliver of its population, which has exacerbated the city’s longstanding affordability crisis for everyone else, Mr. Levine said in an interview.
“For anyone who’s not in the top 10 percent, they are treading water,” he said.
The findings paint a stark picture of the city post-pandemic and raise urgent and uncomfortable questions for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration: How much can this mayor — or any mayor — do to actually drive down inequality and reverse decades of worsening affordability? Is New York today a runaway train, with entrenched patterns of who makes and spends money, that will make it nearly impossible to reverse course, regardless of political will?
It is a very good time to be rich in New York City. Almost two-thirds of the city’s inflation-adjusted income growth went to the top 1 percent of earners between 2019 and 2024, according to 2024 tax return data analyzed by Mr. Levine’s office. The analysis accounts for New Yorkers’ income before taxes are taken out and before benefits like unemployment were added.
Only the top two income brackets saw what the comptroller’s office called “real income growth,” adjusted for inflation. And that trend was largely driven by capital gains, dividends, interest and other sources that are not straightforward hourly wages.
What that means is that “wealth is pulling away from work,” Mr. Levine said. “What is driving the top 10 percent into the stratosphere is not what they’re getting in their paychecks.”
The “One Percent” has been shorthand for the city’s highest earners since the Occupy Wall Street protests sprung up 15 years ago, but lately you’d really prefer to be in the top 0.1 percent, or, even better, the .01 percent. Those subgroups had a larger share of the city’s overall income in 2024 than they did before the pandemic.
The most exclusive ring of earners in the .001 percent, which represents about 50 New York City families, saw the largest growth in incomes of any city tax bracket between 2019 and 2024. Their average income was almost $600 million a year in 2024, up from roughly $315 million in 2019.
The One Percent is still faring quite well. The people in that group had an average income of over $4 million in 2024, up from about $2.9 million before the pandemic. They took home over a third of all the income earned in the city that year.
For most other New Yorkers, the picture is less sunny.
The average income for all city families was just under $107,000 in 2024. And for everyone not in the top 20 percent or so of earners, inflation mostly erased modest gains in hourly wages.
The report found fresh evidence that employment has been dropping for jobs with midrange pay, a trend that is causing increasing alarm among local economists. (Low-wage jobs, like home health work and food preparation, have seen significant growth.)
More alarming data has been released lately about the city’s affordability crisis.
About half of city households can’t keep up with what it costs to afford basics like housing, food and transportation. New York is unique among the country’s largest cities for recording a significant decline in median household income since 2019.
“Part of why the bottom 90 percent is stagnating, even as their wages are going up, is that it’s not enough to keep up with the cost of living here,” Mr. Levine said.
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