New York City’s richest earners have gotten richer since before the pandemic, while lower-income earners have struggled to keep up with high inflation, according to a new report on income inequality from the city comptroller.
Wednesday’s report analyzed tax returns from 2019 to 2024, finding income inequality in the city increased over those years and New Yorkers face even more income disparity than the national rate.
In 2024, the top 1% of city households held 37% of all income citywide, compared with 22% nationally. Comptroller Mark Levine’s report is the latest data point demonstrating what many New Yorkers have felt firsthand: In the city’s “K-shaped” economy, a few gain more every year, but most continue to struggle financially.
“New York City is generating enormous wealth, but the vast majority of that prosperity is flowing to those who already have the most,” Levine said in a statement. “We need policies that expand economic mobility, build the middle class, strengthen earnings and ensure more New Yorkers can share in the city’s growth.”
New York’s wealthiest, like millionaires across the United States, tend to earn a larger portion of their income through means other than wages as they get wealthier. The report found those means — including capital gains, dividends, interest, rent and other profits — are the primary drivers of faster income growth at the top of the economic ladder.
The city’s poorest residents, the comptroller said, are poorer than their peers in the rest of the country. In the wealthiest city in the world, New York’s bottom 90% of earners still made 9% less than the bottom 90% across the country in 2024, the most recent year in the analysis. The region’s cost of living is also steeper than elsewhere, with the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis estimating New York-area residents face prices 12.6% higher than the national average.
For the bottom 90% of New Yorkers, average real incomes accounting for inflation fell slightly, by 0.8%, from 2019 to 2024, according to Levine’s report. Real wages for the top 1% grew 16.2% over that period, with those for the top 0.001% growing 57.9%. The majority of income for the top 1% came from non-wage sources.
Dora Pekec, a spokesperson for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, said the report “underscores the urgency of the Mamdani administration’s agenda” focused on affordability issues.
“Programs like universal childcare, fast and free buses, and city grocery stores help to alleviate the core cost drivers for working families,” she said in a statement.
Mohamed Obaidy, an economist and associate director at the New School’s Center for NYC Affairs, said the city’s economy is structured around finance, insurance and real estate industries, creating a concentration of millionaires.
The city’s unemployment rate is higher than the national rate — 5% compared to 4.1% as of July — giving workers less bargaining power with employers. And its minimum wage of $17 per hour is lower than those in cities with comparable living costs, including Seattle and Los Angeles, where the minimums are $21.30 and $18.42 per hour, respectively.
Base wages and salaries, though, don’t appear to be responsible for the city’s increasing income inequality, the comptroller report suggests. Pay grew in many of the metro area’s low-wage fields, including healthcare and food and hospitality, between 2019 and 2025.
Andrew Rein, president of the nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission, said in a statement, “the comptroller’s finding that real wages have been stagnant for most New Yorkers reinforces the need to attract and grow more living- and higher-wage jobs, while working to increase affordability by boosting housing production and other programs.”
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