Birmingham Makes List of America's Highest Earning Cities

Birmingham is among America’s highest-earning cities, according to new study by the personal finance site WalletHub that looked at concentrations of wealth across the country.

For the purposes of the study, wealth was defined as $100,000 in annual earnings, not quite two times more than the U.S. household median income of $52,250 reported in a widely circulated Pew Research Center study.

The study tried to measure how Americans define upper-middle or upper class. Forty percent of respondents who put themselves in the higher classes had an annual household income of $100,000 or more. Likewise, U.S. Census Bureau data show that households earning over $100,000 represent the top 20 percent of all earners in America.

So where do all of these high earners live? In the urban powerhouses of New York, Los Angeles or Chicago? Or scattered across the highest-cost-of-living states like Alaska, California or Hawaii?

These cities are primarily clustered in suburban communities in Washington, California, Texas and Tennessee, but Birmingham also made the $100K Club, the only Michigan city to make it on the Top 100 list.

Birmingham not only came in at No. 57 on the list, but also one of only 57 communities in the United States where more than half of households earn more than $100,000 annually.

In Birmingham, 50.2 percent of residents fall in that category. Among that group, 34 percent earn $150,000 or more and nearly 23.9 percent earn more than $200,000, according to the findings.

Half of residents earn $100,000 or more, Birmingham’s inclusion on the list is consistent with a key finding in the study: suburbia rules. Communities with a majority of high earners are concentrated on the periphery of large cities, the data show.

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