The Million Dollar Question: What share of Americans earning over $500,000 call themselves “paycheck-to-paycheck”?
The Million Dollar Question this Friday:
In a 2025 Goldman Sachs survey, what share of U.S. workers earning over $500,000 a year said they were “living paycheck-to-paycheck”?
A) 12% B) 25% C) 40% D) 58%
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Most people guess low — a household pulling in half a million dollars a year sounds, on its face, like the last place financial stress would show up. The actual answer is C) 40%, and the gap between that number and most people’s intuition is the whole story.
Per Goldman Sachs’s 2025 Retirement Survey & Insights Report coverage, about 40% of U.S. workers earning over $500,000 — and 41% of those earning $300,000 to $500,000 — agreed they were “primarily living paycheck-to-paycheck.” The finding has been replicated directionally by surveys from Bank of America, Empower, and PYMNTS, each putting roughly half of $100,000+ earners in the same self-described bucket through 2024 and 2025.
The mechanism, per Fortune’s reporting on lifestyle creep among high earners, is a household that keeps finding new uses for its discretionary income — a bigger mortgage, a longer summer rental, a nicer car — until the line back to zero resets every year. Stack a coastal tax bill, a seven-figure mortgage, two kids’ private-school tuition, and a disciplined six-figure retirement-savings habit on top of that, and the cash left over by the end of the month genuinely can run close to zero.
But the number is also, per financial analyst Ben Carlson’s critique in Half a Million Dollars — covered by 24/7 Wall St — measuring something looser than the plain-English phrase implies. Goldman defined “paycheck-to-paycheck” as finding it “tough to make progress on any long-term financial goals,” broad enough to capture a household saving $100,000 a year into retirement accounts while watching a $5 million target still feel far away. Tellingly, only about 16% of households earning $200,000–$300,000 reported the same struggle — the opposite of what you’d expect if the survey were measuring cash-flow hardship rather than ambition.
What this reveals: at the high-earner level, “paycheck-to-paycheck” is less a budget emergency than a label for aggressive, illiquid saving that doesn’t yet feel like wealth. The real line between a HENRY who eventually becomes rich and one who never does isn’t the headline survey number — it’s whether that deferred cash is landing in a retirement account and home equity, or disappearing into lifestyle creep.
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This question is treated in full in HENRY: $500K and Still Paycheck-to-Paycheck, which goes deeper on the cost-stack math and what separates HENRYs who eventually cross into real wealth from those who never do.
If you have a Million Dollar Question you’d like to see treated in a future Friday email, send it to [email protected].
— Logan Pierce
Editor, How Millionaires Live
