For decades, Massachusetts’ economic growth has translated to rising incomes for many families. A highly educated workforce, concentrated in sectors like education, health care, and technology, has helped lift the state to the highest median household income in the country. But which households have seen the most growth? And how broadly have these gains been shared? This brief aims to answer these questions in two parts. We begin with household income, since households pool resources to cover major expenses like housing and food. We then turn to wage data for individual workers so we can break results out by characteristics like gender, age, and educational attainment, which are harder to isolate when looking at households composed of multiple people.

Part 1: Household Income Trends in Massachusetts

At roughly $105,000, Massachusetts has the highest median household income in the country. The state’s lead has narrowed, however, with Maryland and New Jersey close behind as of 2024, and other economic indicators offer reason for concern. Since January 2025, Massachusetts unemployment has remained above the national rate, and a recent UMass Donahue Institute analysis found that state GDP grew more slowly than the U.S. in the fourth quarter of 2025, 1 percent compared to 1.4 percent nationally.

Looking back over the past several decades, economic growth has been strong in Massachusetts, leading median household incomes to rise by about 35 percent since the 1970s, increasing from roughly $80,000 in 1973 to $108,000 in 2025 (inflation adjusted). Growth has been especially strong among dual-earner households, where incomes climbed from about $116,000 to $197,000, a 70 percent increase. This reflects both rising earnings and the phenomenon of “assortative mating,” with people of similar educational and earning potential increasingly forming households together. By contrast, incomes for single-earner households grew much more slowly, increasing from $83,000 to around $96,000, or about 16 percent.

Continuing this half century of growth – both small and large – is not a sure thing. Recent economic headwinds threaten the conditions that put Massachusetts first among states for median income. The federal immigration crackdown is likely to constrain labor force growth in a state that relies heavily on immigrant workers. And large federal cuts to research funding appear to be slowing activity in universities, hospitals, and innovation-driven industries that anchor the Massachusetts economy. Together, these shifts raise questions about how durable the state’s recent income gains will be, though most of the data used in this analysis extend only through 2024 and do not yet capture these more recent policy changes.

While instructive, median household income only captures the midpoint of the household income distribution. This single benchmark masks how households have moved around the median over time. To understand this, we group Massachusetts households into three income tiers, based on their position relative to the median in 2025. We define these groups as households earning less than $72,000, or about 67 percent of the median, for low-income; between $72,000 and $215,000, or 67 to 200 percent of the median, for middle-income; and above $215,000, or more than 200 percent of the median, for high-income (all household incomes inflation adjusted). The lower threshold roughly aligns with eligibility for programs like affordable housing or child-care subsidies. Applied more broadly, this framework also produces a middle-income group that captures about half of households, similar to approaches used by researchers at Pew. These cutoffs also correspond to meaningful differences in how households spend and save.

The most notable shift is a declining share of middle-income households, a trend that echoes broader national concerns about a shrinking American middle class. But these data only support that narrative in a counterintuitive way—the middle-income share has declined not because of a relative increase in lower-income households, but because there’s a growing share of high-income households. High-income households made up just 4 percent of all households in 1973, while today they account for about 21 percent statewide. The shrinking middle mostly appears to reflect upward movement, a far more favorable outcome than if growth were concentrated at the lower end of the distribution, especially because the share of the lowest tier has also shrunk.

Finally, we break out these trends by race and ethnicity. For this, we turn to the American Community Survey, which provides more detailed demographic breakdowns, though with slightly older data. We apply the same method used above to group households, although note that the older dataset lowers the overall median income benchmark (with the middle falling roughly between $68,400 and $204,00).

Higher income household share has grown across all groups. 

Proportion of households by income group in 1990 and change in 2024. Massachusetts. 2024 dollars.

1990, U.S. Census. 2024, 5-Year American Community Survey. IPUMS, University of Minnesota, www.ipums.org

Across all racial and ethnic groups, the share of high-income households has increased over time, reflecting the broader statewide pattern. This growth is especially pronounced among Asian families, where the high-income share has risen by about 19 percentage points, compared to increases of roughly 6 points for Black and Latino families and 11 points for White households. Despite this diversification of high-income households, a racial assessment shows White and Asian household shares remain far higher than shares for Black and Latino households within this high-income bracket.

Part 2: Wage Trends by Education, Gender and Age

To better understand who has benefited from this recent economic growth, we now shift from households to individuals, so that we can disaggregate the data by education, gender, and age, harder factors to isolate when analyzing households that pool income across multiple people. For this analysis, we focus on wage and salary workers aged 16 and older, building on an approach used by the Economic Policy Institute. This approach comprises people actively earning wages and excludes those who may be retired or relying primarily on fixed income sources such as Social Security (for a deeper look at wage trends by race, which we don’t include in this section, see From School to the Labor Market: Identifying Workforce Inequities for Black Men).

After adjusting for inflation, hourly wages for workers with college degrees have increased substantially since 1980, reflecting a labor market that increasingly rewards higher levels of education. Those with a bachelor’s degree earn about $8 more per hour than in 1980, reaching roughly $39/hour today, while workers with a master’s or other professional degree earn about $11 more, or around $51/hour.

By contrast, workers with only a high school diploma have seen little to no wage growth. Their hourly wages are up slightly from 1980, by about $0.30, and have fallen from their peak in 1990. Today, non-degree holders earn about $23/hour. That figure may be somewhat supported by Massachusetts’ higher minimum wage, which has helped set a floor under wages at the lower end of the distribution.

The gender pay gap is a well-documented problem, and one of the most common ways to measure it is through per-dollar parity. In Massachusetts, for example, a 2025 study finds that women earn about 83 cents for every dollar earned by men. These gaps are larger for many women of color, with Latina women earning roughly 50 cents on the dollar compared to men.

While per-dollar parity offers an intuitive and widely used snapshot of inequality between men and women, it offers only a partial view of the gap. As an aggregate measure, it reflects differences in average earnings across all workers but does not distinguish between the many factors that shape those averages. Differences in occupation, industry, hours worked, years of experience, and educational attainment all play a role, as do broader structural dynamics such as occupational sorting and caregiving responsibilities. As a result, the measure captures the combined effect of these forces but cannot, on its own, explain how much each one contributes or how disparities play out across the full wage distribution.

As one alternative approach, below we look at how men and women are distributed across the wage scale. We divide workers into $10 hourly wage increments and calculate the share of men and women within each band. For example, the $10 increment includes all workers earning between $0 and $9.99 per hour. This allows us to see how the entire workforce is spread across wage levels, rather than relying on a single summary statistic that can be influenced by very high or very low earners.

This distributional view shows both meaningful progress and persistent gaps. In 1980, just 19 percent of women in Massachusetts earned more than $30 per hour, compared to 48 percent of men. Only about 1 percent of women earned above $70 per hour. By 2024, 46 percent of women earn more than $30 per hour, an increase of 27 percentage points, and about 6 percent earn above $70 per hour. Women are now much better represented at higher wage levels than in the past.

Even so, gaps remain. About 53 percent of men earn more than $30 per hour, compared to 46 percent of women, and men are still more likely to be concentrated at the very top of the distribution, with 10 percent earning above $70 per hour. These differences highlight that while the gender wage gap has narrowed over time, it has not closed.

Between 1980 and 2024, all age groups saw growing hourly wages, though growth certainly comes at uneven rates. As workers age, they tend to have higher wages reflecting the experience they gain as they perform their work. Wages for workers older than 35 have risen by more than $14 per hour for each of these groups, and nearly $19 for workers between the ages of 45 and 54. There’s a growing gap, however, between the wages of younger and older workers. Around $15 separated the highest earning age group from the lowest in 1980—but that’s since doubled. Incomes for the youngest workers are simply not keeping up with their older coworkers. Indeed, the youngest group makes just over 2 dollars more per hour than they did in 1980 (all figures inflation adjusted).

Finally, how do these factors interact, and what do they reveal about changes in wages over time?From our education breakdown, we know that returns on education yield higher median wages. From the gender analysis, we know that the pay gap has closed since 1980 but has not reached full parity. And from the age analysis, we see how much age returns a premium to wage growth, and increasingly so in recent years.

But while these elements alone show changes, there are limitations. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston have noted, for instance, that simple wage comparisons can blur the effects of shifts in who is working or broader macroeconomic change, especially when population aging or other compositional changes are at play. Migration may also matter here, as inflows and outflows of workers at different ages and skill levels can shape the overall wage distribution we observe.

So, inspired by the Fed’s own analysis, the graphs below track changes in wages by educational attainment, gender, and specific points in the age distribution (to account for experience) in Massachusetts. We present these combined views as a tool for exploration, allowing readers to examine for themselves how wages vary across groups and over time.

At the same time, a few clear patterns emerge. Wage growth has been strongest for highly educated workers, particularly men. Returns to education are largest for those with a master’s degree or higher, and gender gaps persist even within these groups. For example, in 2024, men ages 50–54 with advanced degrees earn about $71 per hour, roughly $20 more than women with the same level of education.

Women with bachelor’s degrees or higher have also seen wage gains, but their earnings tend to plateau earlier than men’s. This is especially true for women with only a bachelor’s degree, where wage growth levels off around ages 35 to 44. Growth is stronger for women with advanced degrees, though still less pronounced than for men.

At the other end of the spectrum, workers with only a high school diploma face ongoing challenges. Among those ages 25–29, wages have declined since 1980, from about $23 to $19 per hour for men and from $19 to about $17 for women. While wages do rise with age for these workers, men continue to see larger gains. By ages 60–64, men earn about $32 per hour, up $13 from 25–29-year-olds, compared to about $23 per hour for women, an increase of $6.

Conclusion

Our state’s multi-decade run of strong economic growth has translated into significant income gains for many households and workers. One clear result is a sharp increase in the share of high-income households, fueled in part by rising wages among highly educated workers. Massachusetts now has a much larger share of high-income households than, driven in part by rising wages among highly educated workers. These higher-income families are also more diverse than they once were, with growing shares of Black, Latino, and Asian households reaching higher income tiers. At the same time, these gains have not been evenly distributed. Wage growth has been strongest for more highly educated workers and for men, but workers with only a high school diploma have seen basically no wage gains at all.

Recent economic headwinds offer some reason for concern about ongoing growth and increasing parity. Unemployment is now running above the national average, and federal research funding cuts paired with an immigration slowdown could be especially harmful for a region like ours. The state’s economy has delivered strong income growth in recent decades, but whether that trajectory continues will depend on how we move through this next period of change.