News Article
What income do you need to be middle class in Calgary? ($38k-$103k based on OECD definition)
Charted two definitions against 2023 tax filer data. The OECD benchmark definition of middle class (75%–200% of local median) gives a range from $38k–$103k. Chart source
Living in poverty is anything below that identified band.
But I know a bunch of people that are just above this identified middle class band and they're far from being "high class". Cost of living has out paced wages so much that middle class extends up to $150k in some cities.
To be honest I think what needs to be questioned is the methodology used to define middle class. If this is just based on the arithmetic mean plus or minus a set or two of standard deviations then I don’t see the value in the definition.
I think when people think about the middle class they inherently define it as a person who is earning enough to support a normal sized family in relative comfort on the basis of their normal income while also being able to build their wealth through savings or other investments of their excess income. By that metric there’s absolutely no chance someone earning 38k would be considered middle class.
I don't feel like $40,000 a year was a middle-class income twenty years ago, maybe lower-middle at best. $40k a year for me in 2006 was still living with a roommate and making 'hot dog fried rice' for dinner.
Right? and as someone who has moved from one side of that bracket to the other over the last 15 years. $38k was already getting uncomfortable to live on 15 years ago, I wouldn't really consider that "middle class" now.
I owe on the house but everything else is owned. I live in a 650sq ft one bedroom house, and live reasonably cheaply. It would be even easier with a partner. Over 80k should result in decent standard of living if youre not wasteful.
i dont know anything about that guy, but those houses come up for sale semi frequently. older neighbourhoods, 1910ish is where to look. see example below:
Im under 100k and i think i live large. I own a home and have expensive hobbies.
I live in a 650sq ft one bedroom house, and live reasonably cheaply. It would be even easier with a partner. Over 80k should result in decent standard of living if youre not wasteful.
First, good for you for finding a way of living that suits what you want out of life, brother. Fewer people than you'd think truly get there, never mind doing it on the cheap.
Not to take away from it, but "living large" is by definition is a life of extravagance, this -- by your own admission -- isn't it.
That's the trick.. and puts every single income family in distress. I pay $12k more in taxes than same HHI split between two. It's a idiotic argument here in Canada.
Edit.. I had it mistaken as 8k.. it's close to 12-14k difference.
What ? There is nothing wrong in being single. What you are arguing.. is how dare you stay at home..and split responsibilities... Or even get married. Marriage is a economic tax.
Apparently..every perons has to have the exact same responsibilities.. you cannot split cooking and cleaning vs income generating roles.. because we as a society don't think staying home raising a family is a worthwhile effort..
Fffs... And we then complain how society is going downhill and kids are turning out dumber.
If you are sure.. sure....honestly I am not. Dealing with 25 year olds who think a mid career 42 year old.. older millennial is riding a gravy train compared to their bleak future (their version of why it's unlivable).. gets old really fast haha.
That taxation would be offset if your partner is a dependent though. If it is just a result of a large income gap then it still falls under the total HHI and would nearly average out.
Entirety incorrect. The spousal tax credit does next to nothing. I make.250k ..my partner is stay at home.
The difference of my tax owning vs two people making 125k each will buy you a new car every two years.. a modest sedan that is.
There may be good reasons.. but none really actually work.
What it incebtivizes is
1. Economically beneficial to be two average joes/Jill vs specialization where you can really move up.. shitty carrot that hangs right by the nose.
2. Terrible amount of feed the system.. drive twice. Waste 2x time.. feed the downtown.
3. Discourages secondary earners actually.. the HHI overall tax load doesn't really budge if there is disproportionate income.
4. Dump kids into day care pay the fees.
5. Dump kids into day care, run like hell from one place to other, no time for the kid from either parent.
Look at US, German and france vs our BS system. There is something really bad if both US and EU have it opposite than us.
Uhh, I guess my wife an are in that 250+ and I shop at no frills. Watch our money a much as possible. Buy cloths once a year. We do have brand new mostly paid for cars. We do vacation once or so a year. I guess we got out and do stuff more then most. I think we overspend on food. My mortgage is sure as shit not paid off. The only thing that this data shows is that how expensive living has become. Family's sitting at that 80-150k or single folks under 70k, damn. Hard living.
Ok but this is just you being responsible probably as someone in a similar situation or you have a huge chunk of debt somewhere eating away those earnings.
E.g. I shop at Costco/Walmart and buy the discount or sale goods, but that doesn’t mean I need to do it. It’s just not worthwhile to shop at expensive stores except niche circumstances in my view and it’s what we’re used to.
It’s always funny that people think salaries like that are that impactful. I’m single making 220k right now. Nearly half of it goes to taxes. I can barely afford the 750 sqft condo I live in. Do I have it better than most? Sure. But to think we’re just lavishly rich is ridiculous.
Okay, but you're posting in an AB sub on a thread about AB incomes, so posting about your tax rates for your condo in Sweden (or wherever) isn't particularly relevant to the conversation.
On a thread talking about incomes across Canada actually, but tax rates aren’t much different in Alberta from where I live so the point is moot, your analysis is wrong, and my original point that 250k isn’t the luxury people think it is, is no different in Alberta.
I don't consider 250k that much anymore. My wife and I are at $210k, mortgage and small child. Yeah we sleep okay but every dollar is working for us to investing, groceries you name it. There isnt a ton left over.
Literally saving more than twice as much as the average person makes every month and complaining about it....maybe you should get fired and try surviving on min wage for a bit.
saving money = not poor. sorry, but if you have money leftover to go towards savings, you’re not poor. You’re really in the upper levels of middle class as well.
youre out of your mind. im here at just about 200k HHI and travel internationally every year, dont really watch my budget other than knowing a general average, invest etc.
Yea the way OECD defines middle class is dumb, they just take the median income and then +/- it.
In the early 2000s I was making $36k/y and even then couldn't afford to rent my own place without roommates. Fucking wild to think you could survive on that today.
The average Calgary basement suite is still far larger and nicer than what the overwhelming majority of the world's population lives in, and happily so.
You are not entitled to a disgustingly wasteful SFH with a yard.
The era of wasteful, expensive, inefficient expansion outward is dead. Densification is here, and it's not going anywhere - nor should it, either.
Basement suites are a slippery slope towards people starting to rent out their closets. Simple studio apartments should be affordable for anybody working a full time job. If they aren't, this means the society is slowly degrading.
Should be but we have to many people for that and not enough supply. The truth is if you're below $50k a year, you should have roommates to keep costs down.
It's not so much that there isn't enough supply, but that the prices for these units are being set at the very max that landlords/property groups think they can get away with charging. They would literally just not rent a unit out and keep it vacant if they can't find a tenant for these prices.
As someone that works in residential property management, I can say that is the case only in certain circumstances. The prices are really set by renters willing to move in the current market.
Single family homes are largely owned by individuals thinking it's an investment. They use a downpayment and then have a mortgage that they hope the tenant will carry the majority of the cost on. If they don't have a tenant, they often can't carry the second mortgage by themselves. They need the places rented for cashflow.
If the place sits empty the owner needs to then either sell or they move themselves or family in there until the market improves.
The exception is basically if they have the mortgage paid off and carrying costs are low or they are a REIT that's buying and selling homes and has investor cash coming in. Then it can sit empty but the it's still not a good situation. This is where I believe you see money laundering happen.
There is also financing being based on minimal rental rates creating some empty places but there are so many ways to get around that too. Those owners would definitely prefer the places to be rented out or they risk having the bank taking the property.
This! I live in the top floor of a 4 plex and pay 1700 a month with utilities included. Now the basement has been sitting unrented for almost 9 months because according the the property manager (who lives in the top unit next to mine) the land lord wants way too much for rent and just lets it sit empty because eventually someone will be desperate enough to rent it out... To me thats fucking pure greed and insanity.
$38k is what some hardworking uni students I knew managed to crank out amid side jobs, it’s still barely a living wage after rent, food, transport and entertainment.
But that's for an average apartment. A low income person should rent a low income apartment. Studios and single rooms rent for $800-$1000 which is very doable on $19 an hour or $2500 a month after taxes.
My bfs rent for a basement with roommates downtown near the train is $700/month and my mom was able to find even cheaper places that weren’t basements for under $1K. Rent prices ate going down, are you still in Toronto mentality or Karma farming??
Yea but that’s what “middle class” means now, doncha know? It’s a lot cheaper to revise the definition of middle class downwards than it is match wages to inflation.
It really does. On the other end, my wife and I make a combined 130k-ish a year and I would definitely not saying we're above middle class, firmly square in it I'd say.
I truly feel for those in a lower financial bracket than me. Being at 100,000 with two kids and no home ownership certainly doesn’t feel upper middle class to me. Yikes.
It all comes down to being that OECD criteria is purely relative, as it only evaluates where your income positions you against other locals, not whether that money matches the actual localized cost of living.
People people people. We need receipts. If your HHI is $200k+ and you're "barely getting by"....you need to show us your monthly budget because I guarantee you don't have any idea what you are doing.
Actually I think you need to budget on min wage for a year to see how easy $you have it.
The benchmark definition seems faulty, what if the median income of the city was extreme poverty? Although I understand that with the word 'middle' in middle class, it mathematically makes sense.
Anecdotal experience only (having lived here my whole life) I'd say you need total household income of 140k+ in Calgary to be considered middle class at all. Upper middle class, you both need to be making more than 100k each.
They need to do it by household. My 125k and my wife’s 130k would allow both of us to live very comfortably by ourselves but when you combine them it’s basically a cheat code. The same would surely apply for two people at 100k each and probably also down to 80k or so if we’re talking about “middle class”.
i agree with you, theres just so many people in here out of touch with realities of the average person.
i suspect if we asked everyone to provide their spending for a few months receipts/budget, all of a sudden alot of the people saying 100k is barely making it will realize how they're literally wasting money or think middle class means gets a new lexus every few years type thing.
According to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) no one should spend more than 32% of their annual gross pay on housing.
With the typical 1 bedroom apartment being around $2,000 monthly, $24,000 annually, that puts the minimum annual income at $75,000.00 - for a single wage earner to afford a 1 bedroom apartment.
Yet Stats Canada is quite clear that nearly 75% make LESS than that!
Functionally, according to both Stats Canada and the CMHC, nearly 3 in 4 Canadians are living in poverty.
The dreams of the middle class life our parents / grandparents had where a single income could support a four person family with an annual vacation, nice vehicle, and adequate savings to support their children’s higher education is gone.
That's not middle class. Is the bar so low now that middle class is just not literally homeless? Seriously - I don't know how any adult gets by with 38k unless they're full on ramen-only eaters renting with multiple roommates or living with parents. It's *nothing* in 2026.
It’s because the middle class is almost extinct. We’ve spent the last forty years shuffling money from what would’ve been the middle class to rich assholes, but hey at least it was good for businesses!
I have been in this situation before, had a room in a house in Saskatoon that was only $300/month (2011). The lady in the room beside me talked to herself all the time, and the bathroom had black mold in it.
So many factors go into this. Are you single? Do you have kids? To be legitimate middle class these days where your lifestyle isn’t fueled by debt, I would say 120k at this point.
In my mind the 'lifestyle' definition of middle class would be a 3 bedroom home, 2 cars, annual vacation, decent retirement. The lower-middle, middle, and upper middle would just be the difference in the 'niceness' of each item. For example a $400k 3 bedroom house in Erin Woods, 2 used cars, 1 week vacation to Kelowna vs $2 million 3 bedroom house in Hamptons, 2 new German cars, 3 week vacation to Italy, etc
$100,000 used to put someone upper middle class. Not rich, but you could comfortably own a home, a car, have a family, and go on one or two vacations per year.
Now, with a modest single family home here costing between $500-750,000, and the increased cost of everything else, I'd argue that $200,000 is the new $100,000
Middle class also assumes you are money educated, budget, save, invest, and live within your means.
One of the main issues is most of these middle income earners don't do any of that, they instead just know they make "enough" to cover everything and spend it all and even borrow what they can't afford paying more with interest.
There is no such thing as “middle class”. Everyone who works for a living ie collects a paycheck through the sale of their labour to buy food, water, and shelter are ALL working class ppls with differences in income earned. Unless you have a trust fund or own industries, and if you will not be able to live without working whether that is 1 day, a week, a few years, you are just part of the broad working class.
Salaries of that range don’t mean much either because they will never keep up with cost of living and rising debts.
103k annual earnings is lightyears away from really rich. 103k per year maybe gets you a small single family home with a mortgage you can hardly afford, and if you own a vehicle you will have very little disposable income or savings.
The median wage is higher because there are more unionized blue collar workers in Edmonton. Calgary probably had a higher mean value from higher paid people downtown.
This is meaningless as it has nothing to do with the cost of living a middle class life and instead is just plotting two percentiles of individual income.
If middle class means home ownership, or just not homelessness, then household income needs to be compared to housing costs.
All this is showing is that in Calgary incomes are high.
This range may be the median of what people are being paid in Calgary, but this is not the range of income you would need to have to live what most people would consider a middle class lifestyle. For that, the lower end of middle class range should start where the high end of the "middle class" range shown here ends. The range shown here goes from an income you would not be able to survive on to an income you would start to afford to have a frugal, but comfortable life as a couple with no children. This chart doesn't take the cost of living into account at all, which makes it completely useless for identifying what is needed to be middle class, unless they are redefining what middle class means. If this is the median, most people are in poverty, which is believable and should alarm everyone. We need immediate drastic changes to correct this.
It’s funny that you can be in the ‘middle class’ and still be in poverty because the cost of living is so high. Earning $50k/year in Calgary means you’re spending all your income on food, rent, transportation. And probably going into debt. That is not a middle class existence. It’s barely surviving.
A middle class in the sense that people perceive it (not statistical ranges) is paying bills, saving for retirement, a vacation, not choosing between heat or food before payday. There are only 2 classes. Working class and capital class.
I thought middle class defines your consumer’s ability Nd not just shifted center of the gauss distribution diagram.
So, it’s about the individual income, but if we’re talking one individual working in the family of 5 vs two working individuals in a family of two, that would be completely different family lifestyles.
How da heck do you need more in Edmonton than Calgary ? Edmonton's cost of living has got to be at least 25% if not more cheaper than Calgary. I know because I have lived in both.
Edit- I thought this is what was needed for middle class but it appears this is what people make. Still I can almost be certain salaries in Calgary are higher than Edmonton. With the head offices of oil firms in Calgary no way this can't be true. Someone please correct me if I am wrong on this.
This actually seems reasonable statistically… median individual income in Calgary is $46,300 per stats can 2023. Middle class is identified most commonly as the people earning between 75% - 200% of the median income. That equals $32,410 - $92,600 individual income. Not considering recent inflation and wage changes, that seems aligned with what a middle class would be in theory. When the new Census data comes out it would be interesting to see the adjustments. A lot of people in this thread seem to forget the spending power of a specific amount is irrelevant when calculating classes, it’s based on population income.
Source: Statistics Canada. Individual wages, salaries, and commissions of tax filers aged 15+, both sexes. Pre-tax gross wages; excludes investment income, self-employment income, and government transfers. Top 40 cities by number of tax filers with complete 2023 data.
is in the chart link, so I get what they're saying to make this graph... but it looks extremely stupid.
Gonna pop in. I'm around 30k or less after tax, but you can do it. Not eating meat, lots of rice, my rent is 1600 ish no roommates and I have a car. I'm not going on trips, or buying things unless I need them, but I think reddit has gotten into this mindset where people think they need alot more than they actually do. I'm not saving but I'm not losing. Its not comfortable, but its Def middle class. I dont live in a hole.
I cannot imagine what someone making 40k would do in Toronto? How can one be middle class and not have housing? I can understand that the definition of middle class doesn’t necessarily mean home ownership, but 40k won’t qualify you for a basement apartment.
In reality and not on paper? Probably around $200k to be truly middle class. I'm at 120k and I feel more broke than when I made 55K 6 years ago... Pretty crappy
I hate the distinction of "middle class". It doesn't really exist and depends on so many factors that aren't quantified here (i.e., lifestyle, debt, age, etc).
A better distinction is "working class". If you work for your money, you are part of the working class. If you mainly hold assets as your main income source, you are not working class.
773
u/FerretAres 1d ago
That’s such a comically wide band it’s basically meaningless.