Median household income plus public services, by country

Question: how well off is a typical household in each rich country once you count the health care, schooling and social care it receives besides its cash income? The short answer: counting services closes about half of the United States' cash lead over Western Europe. Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Denmark come out level with or above the US, and Canada sits at 89 (US = 100).

The starting point is median disposable household income: what the middle household has after taxes and cash transfers, adjusted for household size, from the OECD Income Distribution Database, in US dollars at purchasing power parity (PPP), so prices are comparable. To that I add the per-person value of public and insured health care, public education and other in-kind social services (elder, disability and child care, housing). Each service is valued at what is spent on it, converted at its own price level, so expensive US health care counts for less than its dollar cost.

Compare two countries

Values are per household-size-adjusted adult, in US dollars. Services are each country's per-person spending times 1.5, the same values the ranking uses. The exchange-rate row converts cash income at that year's market exchange rate instead of PPP, so it shows what the income buys in dollars, not at home. You can link to a comparison: the address updates when you pick.

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Countries, ranked by income plus services

Click a column header to sort. Index columns put the US at 100. Cash only: median disposable income. Plus health and education: version 3. Plus all services: version 5. Mean consumption: the OECD's official actual individual consumption per person, a mean rather than a median, shown as a cross-check.

Cash income against GDP per person

GDP per person measures output, not what households receive. Countries below the diagonal give their typical household less than their output suggests: Ireland and Luxembourg because multinational profits and cross-border commuters inflate GDP, Latin America and Turkey because of inequality.

US states, Canadian provinces and countries, cash income only

US states are computed from the Census Current Population Survey (CPS) March 2024 microdata and adjusted for each state's prices with the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) regional price parities. Provinces use Statistics Canada's median adjusted after-tax income and are not adjusted for price differences within Canada. States within about 5% of each other are not reliably ranked.

Method and limits

• Services: health is total health spending minus out-of-pocket payments (so it includes employer-paid insurance), as OECD real expenditure per person at health PPPs; education is government education spending from the World Bank at education PPPs; other services are public in-kind social spending from OECD SOCX (mostly 2021 shares applied to current GDP). Per-person values are multiplied by 1.5 to approximate a household-size-adjusted unit.
• Valuing services at cost measures how much is provided, not how good it is.
• Adding the average service value to the median household is a shortcut; research studies assign services household by household.
• Croatia is left out because its health figure looks like a unit error. Japan is missing for lack of an education figure. Some countries' latest income year is 2020 to 2024 instead of 2023.

Data retrieved 2026-10-31 and 2026-11-01.