Median Household Income (MHI)

Median household income (MHI) refers to the distribution of household income into two equal groups, one having incomes above the median, and other having incomes below the median.

A household is defined as persons classified as members of a married-couple family, other family type, or as an unrelated individual. Their monthly family income, therefore, represents the sum of all cash income received by the individual and/or other family members. It may represent income from employment, assets (such as CD’s, rental property, savings accounts), and other sources (such as Social Security, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, pensions , State unemployment compensation, and so on).

Emsi’s Median Household Income comes from the five year ACS data and includes data for individual ZIP codes,  Census Tracts, counties, MSAs, States, and the nation. Emsi does not provide MHI when aggregating regions, since one cannot create a new median by averaging the medians of those individual regions. ACS five year data has a two-year lag between when the data is collected and when it is released (i.e. a late 2017 Emsi data run would include 2011-2015 ACS data).

Source: The Census’s Median Household Income