Motio Research produces monthly estimates of U.S. median household income using microdata from the Current Population Survey, the nation’s primary monthly labor force survey.

The series is designed to answer a simple but important question: How is U.S. household income changing from month to month?

Official household-income estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau are released once a year, in September, and refer to the previous calendar year. Motio provides a more timely view using income information collected each month through the CPS.

Our approach builds on the work of Sentier Research, which demonstrated how monthly CPS data could be used to estimate median household income. Motio follows the core logic of that approach while incorporating refinements to improve stability, consistency, and comparability over time.

CPS respondents report their household income over the previous twelve months. The measure follows the Census money-income definition: regular pre-tax money income, excluding capital gains, tax credits, and noncash benefits. Each estimate therefore covers a twelve-month period but is updated monthly.

To produce the series, we convert reported income ranges into estimated household-income values, apply CPS household weights, adjust for inflation, align the results with official Census benchmarks, and seasonally adjust the data to make changes over time easier to interpret.

The nominal and real median household-income series are presented as three-month moving averages to reduce short-term volatility. We define household-income momentum as the year-over-year percentage change in the three-month moving average of real median household income.