Montgomery County’s median household income was about $140,837 in 2024.
That number makes the county sound almost uniformly wealthy. It is not.
Around one-third of county households earned at least $200,000, while 36% earned less than $100,000. Both ends can grow at the same time, leaving the median somewhere between two very different experiences. You can notice pieces of that difference at school. Some students can stay late for any activity they want. Others need to leave for work, pick up a sibling or catch a long ride home. Some can take an unpaid summer opportunity. Others can’t even consider it.
The data help explain why those differences can feel so large.
Montgomery Planning studied how the county’s population changed by income between 2005 and 2022. It found that the county gained 87,927 residents classified as low income, lost 26,279 classified as middle income and gained 67,177 classified as high income. Added together, those changes equal a net population increase of 128,825.
The total confused me at first.
The low-income share of the population increased from 25% to 30%. The middle-income share fell from 23% to 18%. The high-income share stayed near 52%, even though the number of high-income residents increased by more than 67,000. That can happen because the county’s overall population was growing at the same time. The high-income group became larger without becoming a larger percentage of the county. The five-percentage-point increase in Montgomery County’s low-income share was the largest among the 50 large counties included in the study. The middle-income group fell in both number and percentage.
But the categories themselves need to be explained. Montgomery Planning defined income using multiples of the federal poverty level. Its “high-income” cutoff was actually slightly below the county’s area median income for a family of four in 2022. A separate county estimate placed a locally middle-income family of four between roughly $83,000 and $138,000. The phrase “67,177 more high-income residents” is misleading if you read it normally. It doesn’t mean that 67,177 extremely wealthy people moved into Montgomery County. Some families counted as high income by the study would consider themselves middle income here.
I think that actually makes the problem more serious. The official loss of 26,279 middle-income residents likely captures only part of the group that earns too much for many assistance programs but not enough to buy comfortably in Bethesda, Potomac or other expensive parts of the county.
Income is only part of the story. The other divide is what I would call tenure inequality: the difference between households that already own property and households that are still trying to enter the market. Montgomery Planning found that households earning more than $150,000 and householders older than 55 were the only major groups adding homeowners on net in an earlier housing assessment. The public summary didn’t give a clean percentage-point decline for every income group, so I won’t pretend it did. But the direction was clear. Growth in homeownership was becoming concentrated among older and higher-income households.
Imagine two families earning similar amounts today. One purchased a home several years ago. It has a low mortgage rate, and each monthly payment builds equity. As the home rises in value, the family becomes wealthier. The second family rents. It’s trying to save a down payment while also paying rising housing costs. As home prices increase, the amount it needs to save moves farther away. Their current salaries might not look completely different. Their long-term finances can be.
A temporary difference in when someone entered the market can become a permanent difference in wealth.
When workers can’t afford to live near their jobs, they often pay in another way: commuting. A longer commute costs money through gasoline and car maintenance. The larger cost may be time. An hour spent driving is an hour that can’t be spent with family, helping a student or participating in the community. A new MCPS teacher earns at least $66,690. Bethesda’s median gross rent was $2,469 in the Census Bureau’s 2020-2024 estimate. Rent alone would consume around 44% of the teacher’s gross salary.
The teacher can look for a cheaper home farther away. The lower rent then comes with a longer drive. For students, this can appear in ways that are easy to miss. A teacher may leave immediately after the final bell instead of staying for tutoring. A coach might turn down a position because the commute is unreasonable. Schools can also lose employees to jobs closer to where they can afford to live.
None of that appears in the county’s median-income statistic.
Montgomery Planning expects the county to add more than 60,000 households between 2020 and 2040. The largest projected income group earns between $25,000 and $49,999 and represents 26.6% of the expected growth. Another 23.9% is expected to earn at least $125,000. Together, those groups make up 50.5% of the growth. That’s a lot, but nearly half of the projected growth still sits somewhere between those groups. Montgomery County won’t contain only rich and poor households.
The county will need several very different kinds of housing at once. It needs deeply affordable rentals at the bottom and realistic paths to homeownership for the middle. The county’s Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit program has produced more than 17,000 below-market homes since 1973. That’s a major accomplishment. But MPDUs generally focus on households earning around 65% to 70% of the area median income. The county also needs options for families above those limits but far below the income needed to purchase a million-dollar home.
Montgomery County usually measures housing progress through the number of units approved, permitted or built. Those numbers matter. They don’t tell us whether teachers and young families are becoming more or less able to stay. I think Montgomery Planning should publish a Middle-Income Retention Scorecard each year before the county budget is approved. It should track homeownership by local income band, the number of two- and three-bedroom homes affordable around 80% to 120% of area median income, the number of permanently restricted ownership homes created and commuting times for major groups of public workers.
The report should trigger action. If middle-income homeownership falls or public-worker commuting gets worse for two years in a row, the County Council should be required to hold a public hearing and include a specific response in the following housing budget. The response might involve community land trusts or shared-equity homes. The scorecard wouldn’t decide the policy by itself. It would stop the county from publishing another report, acknowledging the problem and then moving on.
The growth of Montgomery County’s lower-income population isn’t itself a failure. A successful county should be able to welcome lower-income families, retain middle-income workers and make room for higher-income households at the same time. The problem is that limited housing can turn growth into a competition over who gets to remain. From a high schooler’s perspective, inequality isn’t usually visible as a coefficient. It’s visible in who has time, who travels the farthest, who can take an unpaid internship and who already assumes they’ll have to leave after graduation.
Montgomery County isn’t simply dividing into rich people and poor people. It is dividing into people whose place here feels secure and people whose place here feels temporary. That’s the divide the county should be measuring. Method note: I did not use the earlier claim that the county’s Gini coefficient increased from 0.42 to 0.46 because I could not confirm a consistent primary source and time period.