Method
Every number on this site is reproducible from public data. This page says exactly how, for each of the five tools, and is equally explicit about what these figures do not mean. If you intend to quote a figure from here, read the relevant section first.
What is being measured
The India figures rest on the World Inequality Lab’s study of India, which estimates pre-tax national income per adult aged 20 and over. It combines national accounts, income tax tabulations and household surveys, and covers every adult in the country — not only salaried workers, and not only people with an income.
That last point matters more than any other on this page. When the site says you are in the top 5%, it means: out of every 100 Indian adults — including students, homemakers, the retired and the unemployed — about five have a higher income than you. It is not a ranking of salaried professionals, and it is not a ranking of households.
The five tools and what each one answers:
- Your standing — where your income ranks among Indian adults.
- The world — where it ranks among everyone alive.
- Your parents — your pay against a parent’s, in gold, prices and rank.
- Your tax — what you hand over, and what it buys.
- Over time — how far the bar for standing out has moved.
Your standing in India
How a percentile is calculated
The Lab publishes exact income thresholds for 2022–23: the 50th percentile at ₹1,05,413 a year, the 90th at ₹2,90,848, the 99th at ₹20,73,846 and the 99.9th at ₹82,20,379. Between two published thresholds this site fits a local Pareto distribution, the standard way of interpolating income data, which reproduces every published anchor exactly. Below the median, incomes follow a power law whose exponent is set so average income in the bottom half matches the Lab’s published figure. Above the 99.9th percentile the tail follows a Pareto curve fitted to the Lab’s published top averages.
Bringing it up to date
The published distribution is for 2022–23. To state it in today’s money, every threshold is scaled by the growth in nominal national income per adult between then and 2025–26 — a factor of 1.255, computed from World Bank figures for nominal GDP and population by age band. The shape of the distribution is held fixed at its 2022 form. Inequality in India has been rising for four decades, so if that assumption is wrong, it is wrong in the direction of making these thresholds slightly too low.
| 2025–26 | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Median adult (50th percentile) | ₹11,026 | ₹1,32,311 |
| Top 10% begins | ₹30,422 | ₹3,65,064 |
| Top 1% begins | ₹2,16,919 | ₹26,03,033 |
| Top 0.1% begins | ₹8,59,832 | ₹1,03,17,990 |
The adult population used throughout is 98.3 crore, derived from World Bank age bands. As a check, the same derivation applied to 2022 lands within 1.1% of the adult population the Lab itself reports.
Your standing in the world
The world figures come from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform, which reports — for any daily income — the share of the world’s population living below it. The curve is sampled across the income range for 2024 and interpolated, against a world population of 814.2 crore.
Your salary is converted in two steps and both matter: first deflated to 2021 prices using India’s consumer price index, then divided by India’s purchasing power parity factor of 19.469 rupees to the international dollar. A rupee buys more in India than a dollar does in the United States; skipping that step would put every Indian artificially near the bottom of the world.
The World Bank measures household consumption or income per person, not per earner, which is why that page asks how many people your income supports. One salary supporting a family of four ranks very differently from the same salary supporting one person.
The India and world percentages are not subtractable. The India figure is pre-tax national income per adult from the World Inequality Lab; the world figure is household consumption per person from the World Bank. They are different quantities from different sources, and household surveys are known to understate the very top. Read each as a fact about its own distribution, never as a difference between them.
The comparison with your parents
That page deliberately avoids historical percentiles — see the section below for why they are not available. It uses three measures that need no distributional modelling at all:
- Consumer prices. Their salary restated in today’s rupees using the World Bank’s CPI series for India.
- Gold. How many grams of 24K gold one month’s pay bought, then and now, at Indian market rates. Gold is the one store of value Indian families have priced consistently for sixty years.
- Rank in the economy. Their salary as a multiple of the average Indian adult’s income in that year, against yours today. This comes straight from national accounts and involves no assumptions about the shape of the distribution.
Where your tax goes
Tax is computed under the new regime for FY 2026–27 as a salaried filer: the ₹75,000 standard deduction, the seven slabs, the section 87A rebate together with its marginal relief, surcharge above ₹50 lakh, and the 4% health and education cess. The old regime is not modelled, because it depends on deductions this site has no way of knowing.
The split of where it goes uses ministry-level allocations from the Union Budget 2026–27 as a share of total expenditure of ₹53.47 lakh crore, as analysed by PRS Legislative Research.
Two honest caveats. Personal income tax funds roughly a third of gross tax revenue, and a large part of government spending is financed by borrowing rather than by tax at all. So this is not a literal trace of your particular rupees. It answers a narrower question: if your tax were spent the way the Budget spends every rupee, this is what it would buy.
How the bar moved over time
This page asks what the same real income would have been worth in an earlier year. Your income is restated in that year’s rupees using CPI, then expressed as a multiple of the average adult income of the year, taken from national accounts. The series runs from 1960 to 2025.
It is deliberately not a percentile, and that is not a design choice but a data limit. The Lab publishes income shares by year, not thresholds, and shares alone do not pin a threshold. Reconstructing historical thresholds from them is unstable: attempting it produces non-monotonic and even negative values — a 90th percentile below the median — for almost every year before the mid-2010s. Rather than publish a precise-looking number built on a broken reconstruction, this page uses the one quantity that needs no distributional assumption whatsoever: the mean income per adult.
Read the result carefully. A falling multiple does not mean you got poorer. It means the average Indian’s real income rose, so the bar for standing out moved up with it.
What happens to what you type
Nothing you enter leaves your browser. There is no account, no analytics on your inputs, and your income is never sent to the server, never written into the address bar, and never stored.
Share links and share cards carry only figures that were already on your screen — a percentage, a ratio, a year — never a salary. Anyone opening your link sees where you stand without seeing what you earn. One honest limit: a percentage still implies an income range to anyone who reverse-engineers the model, because position is the entire point. What is prevented is anyone simply reading the number.
What none of this can tell you
- It is not adjusted for where you live. A salary in Mumbai and the same salary in Patna buy very different lives, and none of the national figures here capture that.
- National income includes forms of income — imputed rent, retained corporate profits — that never appear on a payslip. Your salary and the concept being ranked are close, but not identical.
- It ranks individuals, not households. Two earners in one home appear as two separate adults. The world page is the exception, and asks about household size for exactly this reason.
- Incomes at the very top are the hardest thing in economics to measure. Treat anything beyond the top 0.1% as indicative.
- Gold and price comparisons use national averages and annual figures, not the price on the day you were paid.
Sources
- Bharti, Chancel, Piketty and Somanchi (2024), “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922–2023”, World Inequality Lab Working Paper 2024/09 — Table 2 and Table B.1.
- World Bank, World Development Indicators — nominal GDP in local currency, consumer price index, population by age band, PPP conversion factors.
- World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform — global population shares below a given income, 2024, in 2021 PPP dollars.
- PRS Legislative Research, Union Budget 2026–27 Analysis — expenditure by ministry, receipts, and total outlay.
- Historical Indian gold rates, 24K per 10 grams, annual averages.
Found a mistake? That is worth knowing about — the whole point of publishing the method is that it can be checked.