US Income

Each bar represents about 1.5 million US tax returns. The height of each bar is the average annual adjusted gross income of each return, based on 2017 IRS data. It includes couples filing jointly, meaning individual incomes for a given percentile are lower than the averages shown above.

This chart hides how absurdly wealthy the top 0.01% are. If the granularity was extended to 0.01 percentiles, the plot would essentially be a right angle. There would be a line on the right-most side representing about 20,000 incomes averaging over $30 million per year, and a line across the bottom representing everyone else.

The poorest 1% percent are a bit odd. I don't know how or why people get that far into the red. My guess is a mix of medical disasters, failed businesses, home foreclosures, and more than a few cases of tax fraud (i.e. rich folks who "lost money" in 2017, then went back to flipping houses or whatever the following year).