NYC Household Income Dropped $4K During COVID Pandemic: See New Data

NEW YORK CITY — New York City households saw their incomes plunge by nearly $4,000 during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new study.

Median household income throughout the city’s metro area stood at $84,409 in 2021, the newly released U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey found.

By contrast, the metro area’s income level pre-pandemic in 2019 was $88,130, according to the study.

And not all major cities saw such a drop during the pandemic — in fact, incomes in most metro areas stayed level, the study found. New York City and a handful of other metro areas were the exception.

“Median household income decreased in the Chicago metro area, Houston metro area, New York City metro area, and San Francisco metro area,” the study states.

Only San Francisco’s metro area had a steeper pandemic-era decline, with its median household income dropping $5,546, according to the study.

The study is only the latest to show New York City was hit harder economically by the pandemic than other places across the nation.

The city only regained 82 percent of jobs lost during the pandemic by July as the nation’s overall employment rebounded to pre-COVID levels, according to a study released over the summer.

Indeed, the new Census Bureau study found that nationally median household income remained about the same in 2021 versus pre-pandemic 2019, increasing a meager $78 to $69,717.

The last time median household income flatlined or went down was in 2013, the study states.

New York state also proved another exception when it came to wealth and income inequality between 2019 and 2021, according to the study.

The so-called “Gini index,” which measures wealth and income inequality, increased by 0.8 percent nationally.

The Gini index ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 representing perfect equality with a proportional distribution of income, and 1 representing perfect inequality, according to the report.

New York’s fell from 0.515 to 0.514, but it still topped the nation.

“Among the 50 states, New York had the highest Gini index, though both the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico had even higher Gini indexes,” the study states.

Read the full Census study here.