The American Cities That Are Rich and Poor at the Same Time

Median income, the statistic every city comparison leans on, has a blind spot: it says nothing about the shape of the distribution around it. Two cities with identical medians can be a solid middle-class town and a place split between poverty and affluence with almost nobody in between. To find the second kind, we ignored medians entirely and looked at the full household income distribution of every US city with 20,000+ residents, flagging those where at least 20% of households earn under $25,000 and at least 30% earn over $100,000.

Only 39 cities in America manage both at once. Nationally, 15.0% of households fall in the bottom bracket and 39.3% in the top one; these cities exceed the national share at both ends simultaneously. The most polarized is College Park, MD, where 26.8% of households earn under $25K while 40.8% earn over $100K.

All 39 Income-Polarized Cities

Limited to places with at least 20,000 residents.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates.

Two Roads to Polarization

Scan the list and two city types repeat. The first is the university city: thousands of student households earning almost nothing, surrounded by faculty, administrators, and the professional economy a major university anchors. Many entries here also appear in our data-defined college towns, and for them polarization is partly a life-cycle illusion — today's under-$25K bracket contains many of tomorrow's over-$100K households.

The second type is the gentrifying urban core, and its polarization is not an illusion. These are cities where new high-earning arrivals and long-standing low-income residents occupy the same municipal boundaries — often adjacent zip codes — producing income distributions with two humps and a hollow middle. In these places the median household income printed in every profile describes almost nobody: the city's story is at the two ends the median ignores.

Why the Middle Is Missing

A hollowed-out middle bracket usually traces back to housing. Middle-income families — too rich for assistance, too stretched for market prices — are precisely the group priced out first in expensive markets, and several cities on this list rank high on our affordability cliff. The result is a barbell: households wealthy enough to absorb housing costs, households poor enough to qualify for what subsidized and legacy housing remains, and a thinning band between. For the opposite pattern — cities where affluence is the norm across the board — see the six-figure cities.

How We Did This Analysis

Using ACS household income brackets, we flagged every US place with 20,000+ residents where the share of households earning under $25,000 is at least 20% and the share earning $100,000 or more is at least 30% — both chosen to exceed the national shares (15.0% and 39.3%). Cities are ranked by the combined share at the two extremes. Income figures are pre-tax cash income and exclude non-cash benefits.

All figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates. Because estimates pool five years of survey responses, small differences between closely ranked entries may fall within the survey's margin of error. Learn more on our methodology page or at data.census.gov.