CBO examines the distribution of income—and of the means-tested transfers and federal taxes that affect it—from 1979 to 2022, placing particular emphasis on the distributions in 2022 and how they differed from those in 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The Congressional Budget Office regularly analyzes how income is distributed among households in the United States to provide Congress with information about the effects of federal taxes and government spending on households in that distribution. In this report, the agency examines the distribution of income—and of the means-tested transfers and federal taxes that affect it—from 1979 (the earliest year for which relevant data from tax returns are available) to 2022 (the most recent year for which such data are available). The report places a particular emphasis on the distributions of those three measures in 2022 and how they differed from the distributions in 2019, 2020, and 2021—the years immediately surrounding the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
