People also frequently compare themselves to others within their own community, and a person who is middle-income in a rich neighborhood may call himself "middle-class" despite the fact that nationwide, he'd likely be considered rich. The table below looks at this issue for the very high- and low-income counties in the United States, showing the ratio of their median income to the nationwide median income in 2006. Fairfax County, Virginia, and Loudoun County, Virginia, (both suburbs of Washington, D.C.) are the highest in median household income (among counties with populations of greater than 65,000). A household living in the wealthy Fairfax County village of McLean, Virginia, making $100,000 per year may consider itself to be "middle-class," (or even poor) but nationwide, a more accurate label would be "upper-income."
As Table 2 shows, the ratio of median income in Fairfax County to median income nationwide is over 2. That is, the median in Fairfax County is twice that of the nation as a whole. On the other end of the spectrum, the median income in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, is less than half that of the nation as a whole. Therefore, a person may be called middle-class in St. Landry and poor nationwide.
In fact, the Census Bureau estimates that those in the lower-middle class (second quintile) of households on the income scale in Fairfax County have incomes that range from $48,213 to $82,329, meaning that about 80 percent of the households in the county are above the national household median. On the other hand, in St. Landry Parish, the Census Bureau estimates that 80 percent of households have incomes less than $60,385.
