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Photo: Rupert Oberhäuser / IMAGO
Are you retired?
Or single parent?
Then, from a purely statistical point of view, the chances are relatively small that you belong to the income rich in this country.
For while, for example, in the total population of ten households there are three pensioner households, in the top five percent of the income distribution there are only two in ten - and in the top percent only one in ten.
The disproportion is even more pronounced among single parents.
Your statistical chances are significantly better if you are in a couple relationship but have no children in the household and you are not yet retired.
Households like yours make up less than two out of ten households in Germany, but the highest income percentage makes up more than four out of ten.
But where do you stand specifically with your income?
You can find out with the interactive tool of the employer-related Institute of the German Economy (IW).
It is based on data from the SOEP (Socio-Economic Panel), for which many thousands of people are surveyed every year.
Most recently, the SOEP was supplemented with its own sample of the very wealthy; this data is now being included for the first time.
Specifically, the tool depicts the income situation in 2018.
Find out with the interactive graphic what percentage of Germans earn less or more than you. You can also compare yourself with certain population groups.
In order to make income comparable regardless of the number of household members - from single to large families - the IW uses what is known as needs-weighted income.
Adults and children living together are taken into account differently depending on their age in order to calculate a fictitious per capita income.
For example, in a couple household without children, the total household income is divided by 1.5, for a couple with two children by 2.1.
To belong to the richer half of the population, singles must have a net income of more than 2030 euros, a childless couple more than 3050 euros, and a couple with two children under 14 years of age more than 4260 euros.
From 3700 euros, a single household already belongs to the top tenth of the income distribution, the family of four must have an income of more than 7770 euros.
The graphic offers a special option: It not only shows the income distribution for the entire population, but also for a total of 31 subgroups - which differ in terms of employment status, education, gender, place of residence, age, living situation or origin.
In this way, you can not only locate your own position within society as a whole, but also, for example, in the subgroup of academics or singles or tenants.
In addition, the IW researcher Judith Niehues and her colleague Maximilian Stockhausen examined the SOEP data in more detail for an accompanying short report in order to answer the question of which households are particularly often or particularly rarely among the income-rich.
They defined pensioner households as a separate household type - regardless of whether they are single or couple households - and subdivided the remaining households more clearly than in the interactive graphic.
For example, they assigned
non-retired couples who live in the household without children
to three different groups:
Childless double-income couples - the famous DINKs (Double Income, No Kids)
Couples whose children no longer live in the same household - i.e. have usually already moved out
Other childless couples - presumably mostly single-income households.
All three subgroups are clearly over-represented among the income-rich.
That is hardly surprising, since these households do not have to make compromises that reduce their salaries when it comes to the compatibility of work and family.
At the very top - in the highest income percent - this effect is not most pronounced for the DINKs, but for the couples whose children no longer live in the same household.
They make up 9.3 percent of all households in Germany - but 27.1 percent of households in the top income group, i.e. almost three times more.
DINKs, on the other hand, who make up 4.6 percent of all households in Germany, had just under twice as high a share in the top income group, namely 8.5 percent.
One explanation for this could be the age. DINKs also include young couples who want to have children later and who rarely receive top salaries. Couples whose children do not live in the same household, on the other hand, are usually older, their careers significantly more advanced and their salaries correspondingly higher. The IW researchers call these pairs HIKOs - an abbreviation for "High Income, Kids Out".
Statistically speaking, children in themselves do not represent a disadvantage when it comes to the chance of belonging to the high-income group.
Couples with children are just as common here as in the general population.
However, it looks completely different with single parents.
Every twentieth household in Germany consists of one parent and one or more children - for the highest income tenth of the population it is only every hundredth, for the highest income percent only every two hundredth household.
The picture is mixed for single people: every fourth household in Germany is a single household, in the highest income tenth there are significantly fewer.
At the very top, however, with the richest percent, singles are again slightly overrepresented.
