What do you consider a ‘high’ earner?

[Tsort]

In my head, a ‘high earner’ is someone who never really has to think about money. So, perhaps £200K and up. However, I’ve recently seen threads where people on circa £50K are described as ‘high earners’. As a Londoner, that seems like madness to me, but these things are obviously very dependent on where you are.

So, I’m curious. Where do you live and what would you consider a high salary?

anyone who pays higher rate tax, average full time income varies in London it is 39K ( highest) North 27k ( lowest) so the average londoner is on under 40k
only 18% of tax payers pay higher rates 16% 50-150k and almost 2% over 150k
being being in the top 18% makes you a high earner maybe not the highest earners but you are doing better than 82% of the population
disposable income ( take home minus council tax) is not the same as discretionary,
disposable is after complsory taxes, discretionary is after bills while food utilities transport and housing are essential bills the amount they are is related largely to our personal choices, other bills like private schooling phones gym etc are entirely voluntary it is not fixed so some people choose to maximise their borrowing for a bigger house
you can't say you are not a high earner because you have chosen to live in a more expensive area and / or to privately educate your children etc and because of these choices you have little discretionary income ( clothes eating out holidays presents etc)
how much a higher earner is is not related to what you spend your money on or how much you have left as obviously 2 people on even 150K could have wildly different expenditures one could be single in 1 bed flat another could have 3 children and a detached house the former will probably have 6 times the discretionary spending of the other but both are equallly high earners

I’m in London zone 2 and would definitely consider 50k a high earner. Neither DH or I earn anything like that, and never will. I’d be over the moon if my DC earned that -they don’t. We all have good degrees from top universities.

i live in one of the UK’s big non-London cities and to live in a nice area and send 2 kids to private school with no family help you’d need to be earning at least £200k, so for me that’s a high earner.

Agree! I’m a single person on 55k with a mortgage and don’t feel hard done by whatsoever. Im not rolling in it or saving tons but I’ve managed to have 5 foreign holidays this year, I eat out a lot and have an expensive dog. If I earned 70k+ I would feel incredibly comfortable.

median full time salary in London is £40k pa - so anything above that is high

In London, I should have said.

So only 1% of workers are high earners?

@SudocremOnEverything thanks, I never see any of these posts. Perhaps I've been looking in the wrong places, considering I am education and social care based which means it's unlikely for me to ever reach those higher thresholds without managerial responsibilities.

the average londoner working full time is on 39k considering the minimum on NMW full time is 17.9k ( 37.5 hours @ £9.18 ) that means at least 50% of londoners are living on between roughly 18-39K.
so a londoner on 60k is earning 50% more than average for London,
anyone who doesn't know anyone on less than 40K simply doesn't have a very diverse group of acquaintances

The person I know who earns the most living in London is a teacher, who earns around 48k, and I think that’s quite a lot. She’s the highest-earning, I think, of my friends. I earn mid-30s, DH earns less than 30. My DD earns about 21. These are all normal salaries to me.

Interesting but for what purpose? Interesting in the same way you might be interested in a particular celebs decor or car? Interested but no actual value to the knowledge?

If you ask people what they consider to be well off/comfortable they will tell you the level above their current situation in most cases. That holds across all income groups and geographies.

So subjective views are pretty useless, when constantly reinforced and prioritised over objective numbers they become harmful as people start to believe they really are hard done by when they are in the top 20% of the population.

Head teacher, GP, surgeon, lawyer, asset manager, plumber, train driver, bar manager, chief inspector, council CEO…

Garnering subjective views can be helpful - if you want to promote an objective reality then it useful to knows what people perceptions are.

I always find it interesting that most people massively overestimate the amount of land that is built on in the U.K.

I don’t require things to serve a purpose in order to find them interesting. I don’t care if subjective views are pretty useless, and I don’t require ‘value’ be derived from conversations on an MN thread.

If you do, that’s not really anyone else’s issue. The thread title was self explanatory and you were not forced to click, read or post on it. Please go find a thread with more useful knowledge that will be valuable to you. I certainly wouldn’t want to keep you from all the objective data gathering you’re on AIBU for.

Lots of people never teach those salaries without managerial responsibilities though.

And, yes, education and social care are not awash with money. So salaries are depressed.

There are quite a lot of £60k+ jobs out there. Not evenly distributed by sector, and generally requiring a lot to even get an interview for.

The issue of whether a salary is enough for people to actually live on is a separate one to whether £50k is ‘loads’. A single parent with £1300 in nursery fees and £1k of rent to pay a month is going to find it hard to make ends meet on £50k. There’s not much left of the c. £3k take home after that to live off. Regardless where they fall in the income distribution. And they won’t qualify for benefits to top it up. In fact, they really aren’t much better off than someone on a mid £30k salary who manages to qualify for UC to cover about half of their childcare. Longer term: absolutely, they’ll feel the difference. But that doesn’t help you when more than 40% of your take home pay is eaten up by the childcare you require just to be able to go to work. And 75% of your take home pay has disappeared by the time you’ve paid that and the mortgage/rent (and nothing else).

Then you can come on MN to hear how you’re in the top 10% of earners so you must be rolling in it.

By definition, it will be when you have to start paying Higher Rate of tax.

Being a 'high earner' doesn't equal being (or feeling) rich though. They are different things.
but it isn't too difficult to look at the statistics of what people across the country ern, and therefore what makes you a high earner.

To add some perspective, I think it also would affect my thinking if the person were 60 and ant the top of their likely salary having worked their way up, vs the person being in their 20s. A figure of {say} £50k in your 20s when everyone around you is earning £25K is very different from a figure of £50K coming towards the top of your career when your peers are also likely to be Managers, senior Managers etc.

Higher earner for me is about 200k+ pa (Surrey, commuter belt).

To me, yes. I suppose it depends on what you mean by high earner. For me (as stated in the OP) it’s never really having to think about money. It makes sense that’s restricted to 1-2% of people.

It seems that some people interpret ‘high earner’ to mean ‘earns more than average’. This appears to be what’s causing the confusion, so I should probably have been clearer in the OP. That’s on me, I think.

Average UK wages are around £25k, so double that is £50k, which is what I'd regard as a higher earner, especially as that's where higher rate tax kicks in.

I think double the average wages is a pretty good point at which to say someone is a higher earner!

To add some perspective, I think it also would affect my thinking if the person were 60 and ant the top of their likely salary having worked their way up, vs the person being in their 20s. A figure of {say} £50k in your 20s when everyone around you is earning £25K is very different from a figure of £50K coming towards the top of your career when your peers are also likely to be Managers, senior Managers etc

This is such a good point.

Only 15% of people earn more than £50k, so 85% earn £50k or less. So, I'd definitely argue £50k is the point at which people would become "high" earners as they're well and truly in the minority.

@Tsort so with those jobs what do you and your DH earn combined gross?

the higher rate of tax isn’t the top rate of tax though. Is there not a difference between higher earners (relative to the population as a whole) and high earners.

If we are going to use tax rates as the benchmark, wouldn’t it make more sense to pitch ‘high earner’ at the additional rate?

For me the confusion is whether it is gross or net figure, and whether its the combined household figure, or an individual's amount.

you asked what was a high earner, not what was rich or extremely wealthy which I agree with you is the top 1-2%,

so I still think high earner is not related to expenditure, the term earning implies it is income from working not passive or inherited income or indeed wealth or assets neither does it account for debts and at 50K ( higher rate tax ) and roughly double the average salary ( including part time) and 60% more than average full time salary most definitely fits the high earner category.

obviously 50K in Newcastle goes further than 50K in home counties which probably goes further than London but that was not the queation