New York Is Getting Richer. Most New Yorkers Aren’t.

New York City emerged from the pandemic with substantially more total income than it had beforehand. But most of that new prosperity never reached working-class New Yorkers.

Between 2019 and 2024, average income per tax unit in the city increased nearly 9 percent after inflation, according to a new analysis from the Office of New York City Comptroller Mark Levine. Almost two-thirds of that real income growth went to the richest 1 percent of New Yorkers. The top 0.1 percent alone captured more than half. Farther down the income distribution, the post-pandemic recovery looked very different. 

New York’s unequal economy

Analyzing just mean income growth risks obscuring significant inequality. Median income — that is, the exact middle number in a sorted list — fell 3.2 percent after inflation between 2019 and 2024, while average real income for the bottom 90 percent declined slightly. In effect, most of the city experienced five years of little or no real income growth.

The findings, published in the Comptroller’s September report titled Recent Trends in Personal Income & Wage Inequality, put numbers behind an increasingly familiar divide in New York. In a city that continues to generate extraordinary wealth, there is a parallel affordability crisis affecting much of its population.

In 2024, New York City’s top 1 percent—roughly 50,000 taxpayers—received about 37 percent of all income earned by city residents. That figure was 22 percent nationally. Narrow the lens further and the contrast becomes even sharper. Around 5,000 taxpayers making up the city’s top 0.1 percent had average incomes approaching $24 million and together received 22 percent of all city income.

A broader inequality measure points in the same direction. Last year, the Census Bureau reported that New York State had a Gini index of 0.519. The Gini index ranges from zero, representing complete equality, toward one as income becomes increasingly concentrated. New York had the highest estimate among the 50 states. While the figure is statewide rather than city-specific, it offers another benchmark for the extraordinary degree of income concentration surrounding New York City.

The Comptroller’s findings also illustrate the limitations of talking about economic growth without asking for whom. New York’s topline income growth tells just part of the story, and it’s important to disaggregate who captured this income.

As previously noted, city-wide average real income grew almost 9 percent from 2019 to 2024. But an average heavily influenced by gains among multimillion-dollar earners says relatively little about the experience of a typical household. The report finds that only individuals roughly in the top fifth of the income distribution ended 2024 with meaningfully higher real incomes than similarly ranked New Yorkers had five years earlier. 

This means working-class incomes weren’t what drove economic growth. Instead, much of the acceleration at the top came from non-wage income: capital gains, dividends and interest, income from businesses, and rents. 

Capital gains in particular receive preferential federal tax treatment compared with ordinary income — a disparity long defended through a “trickle-down” argument that lower taxes on investment ultimately spur broader economic growth. In New York, then, the economy did grow. But the gains were concentrated overwhelmingly at the top.

Economic growth and inequality — at odds? 

Wages in New York tell a more complicated story. Many relatively low-paid occupations—including food service, health-care support, transportation and sales, as cited in the report—recorded faster wage increases than better-paid fields between 2019 and 2025. The Comptroller concludes that pay differences across occupations have modestly narrowed even while overall income inequality has widened.

For New Yorkers who saw little of the city’s recent income growth, those numbers collide with the rising cost of simply remaining in the city. 

The bottom 90 percent of New York City taxpayers had an average income of about $44,500 in 2024, 9 percent below the corresponding group nationwide. Once New York’s higher prices are factored in, the Comptroller estimates that the purchasing power of their income was roughly 19 percent below that of the national bottom 90 percent.

Housing makes the squeeze particularly visible. More data from the Comptroller’s July newsletter estimate that market rents in June 2026 were roughly 35 percent above their pre-pandemic level.

The September report arrives at a consequential moment. Since taking office ten months ago, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has placed affordability at the center of its agenda. The city’s Rent Guidelines Board voted to freeze increases on both one- and two-year rent-stabilized leases. The administration has also unveiled a housing plan calling for 200,000 new affordable homes and preservation of another 200,000 over the next decade, alongside billions of dollars in planned capital investment.

New York’s affordability crisis, then, can’t be reduced to a story of rising rents and higher prices. The city has continued to generate wealth. The patterns found by the Comptroller illustrate who has benefitted as the city has grown. Since 2019, the answer has overwhelmingly been those already closest to the top.

The Comptroller’s report numbers make the distinction unequivocally clear: an economy can grow substantially without making most of the people living in it substantially better off.