Are you better off than you were four years ago?

The simplest answer to the classic presidential-election-year question appears to be that yes, most Americans are better off now than they were in 2020. As the US Census Bureau reported last month, the 2023 median household income of $80,610 — that’s the middle of the distribution, with half of US households earning more and half less — was about $1,000 higher in inflation-adjusted terms than in 2020, and indications from wage data are that real incomes have probably increased or at least held steady so far this year.

A quick glance at the chart, though, reveals one reason polling results on the economy have been so mixed. Median household income was higher in 2023 than in 2020 but still trailed the record set in 2019. That record came after five consecutive years of real income gains, while 2023’s increase came after three straight years of declines. For most Americans, Donald Trump’s years in the White House were, before the pandemic hit, a time of steadily rising affluence. Since then, things have been more complicated. During Joe Biden’s time in office, the US economy has made a remarkable recovery from the unprecedently sharp downturn of 2020 — with solid GDP growth and big employment gains — but the benefits have been spread unevenly and negated in part by the wave of inflation that accompanied the recovery.

The more frequently released government statistics on median and average earnings complicate this picture even further. For one thing, they make it look as if the depths of the pandemic were the best of times — a mirage caused by millions of in-person service workers getting laid off and thus temporarily removing their relatively low wages from the calculations. For another, though, they seem to depict an era of strong real wage gains that began before the pandemic and has continued lately. Are you better off than you were a decade ago? Yes, you probably are.

Here are inflation-adjusted median usual weekly earnings for wage and salary workers, estimated by the BLS on a quarterly basis from the Current Population Survey. The BLS publishes its real earnings data in 1982-1984 dollars, which I find a little maddening, so I’ve made my own inflation adjustments using the same inflation index as the BLS but expressing the results in 2024 dollars:

Similar patterns are apparent in the closely watched monthly average earnings data derived from the BLS’s Current Employment Statistics, a survey of businesses and other employers. The longer time frame available here brings the historic collapse of real wages during the Great Inflation of the 1970s into the picture and casts recent wage gains as part of a recovery that began in the mid-1990s.

These are average wage gains, not median, and thus can be boosted by high-earning outliers. But they are wages for production and nonsupervisory employees — not the bosses. Include supervisors, and an interesting recent pattern emerges.

Rank-and-file workers were as of September earning an inflation-adjusted 3.6% more per hour than just before the pandemic in February 2020, while the real wages of those higher up had by my rough estimate fallen by nearly 4% percent. Part of this may reflect changes in how work is organized, with the number of private-sector production and nonsupervisory workers growing just 3.6% since February 2020 while the number of supervisory workers is up 10.3%. But it could well be that many high earners are in fact making less after inflation than they did four or five years ago, which is good news in that it signals reduced income inequality but may leave a lot of high-propensity voters feeling cranky.

Americans also received checks from the US government in March 2020, December 2020 and March 2021 that don’t show up in earnings data but are included in the real per-capita disposable (that is, after-tax) personal income estimated by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (the gross domestic product people). They made a big difference!

My choice of monthly data, which the BEA reports at annual rates, admittedly does somewhat exaggerate the scale of the increase and decline. Full-year per-capita income in 2017 dollars rose from $47,249 in 2019 to $50,043 in 2020 and $51,670 in 2021; it was $50,871 in 2023. But that was still a big jump from 2019 to 2021, and unlike the spike in earnings around the same time, it was no mirage. Thanks to the money from Washington, Americans really did have a lot of extra money in their pockets and bank accounts in those days, which is less true now.

On the other hand, those who own houses and financial assets have seen them grow a lot in value over the past four years. The Survey of Consumer Finances conducted every three years for the Federal Reserve Board found that the median American family’s net worth hit an all-time, inflation-adjusted high of $192,700 in 2022.

Here again, there are complications. The survey doesn’t cover nonfamily households; families constituted just 64.2% of US households in 2022 (not much different from 2019’s 64.9% but lower than in earlier decades), and nonfamily households are much less likely to be homeowners.

Also, more adult children than in past decades are living with their parents rather than starting their own households and families, although this percentage has fallen a bit since peaking in 2020.

Still, there is one trait that almost all these statistics share. The most recent numbers show things headed in the right direction, which is better than the alternative.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts.