How Arizona increased its median household income by more than 60% in about 50 years

Article originally posted on HERE on April 17, 2026

A report from the Urban Institute asks a provocative question: Is your state better off now than it was 50 years ago?

It looks at median household income across the country, and it turns out that, by that metric at least, Arizona is better off now than it was half a century ago.

The median household income here in 1970 was just north of $48,000. In 2023, it was more than $77,000 — a more than 60% increase. That was one of the biggest jumps in the country.

Sean Ewen is a research economist at the Seidman Research Institute at Arizona State University. He joined The Show to talk more.

MARK BRODIE: Sean, what are your takeaways from this report as it relates to Arizona?

SEAN EWEN: Yeah, so the data found that median household income has risen for households in the United States over the past 50 years. But that rise has been different in different states, right. I think most states have risen, with the exception of West Virginia. West Virginia was the only one that saw a fall in real median household income.

Arizona’s rise was actually pretty large. Part of the reason for that was because we started from a pretty low baseline. In 1970, I think Arizona’s rank in real median household income was 44th. I believe in 2024, it was 20th. So we rose from being near the bottom to closer to the middle. A little bit better than the middle, right. So that’s one reason for the big increase.

Another reason for the big increase was it helps to have a idea of what caused economic growth in the United States in general. And economic growth generally happened in industries that benefited from advances in digital and electronic technology over that time period.

So we’re talking about industries like information technology, some fields of engineering, electronics, financial services …

BRODIE: … the kinds of companies that we tend to see here.

EWEN: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so we had good base of that. We didn’t have the same companies that, say, California had. But in the middle of the 20th century, we had a large aerospace and defense industry. This brought in a lot of highly educated people.

In the ’70s and ’80s, we got investments in semiconductor manufacturing. We already had companies like Motorola here. So this really brought in some of those industries that really helped Arizona take advantage of those increases in technology that I was just talking about.

BRODIE: Yeah, well, so given all that, is it surprising to you that the jump in median income was what it was in Arizona?

EWEN: It’s not surprising, I don’t think. I mean, we saw Arizona kind of converge to the middle and maybe even do a little bit better over that timeframe. Other states that did not have the same convergence or fell in the rankings of real median household income. These states tended to be states that were more exposed to manufacturing. So Rust Belt states.

And over this time frame, you saw in the United States the decline of manufacturing industries in many U.S. states. So states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Michigan, those experience much less, less increases in household income.

BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting you mentioned manufacturing because among sort of the socioeconomic factors that this report looks at the percentage of manufacturing workers, the number of manufacturing workers is one of those. And in Arizona, we were down 8% over those 50 years.

But in many other categories, the state was up in terms of bachelor’s degree holders, up 21%. The residents 64 and older was up. Foreign-born population is up. So it kind of speaks to what you’re talking about in terms of, of not, you know, Arizona, not super-dependent on manufacturing, but other factors that sort of maybe led to this increase.

EWEN: Yeah. And you mentioned bachelor’s degree holders. And this is something, education levels is something that comes up time and time again in this area of study, right. Because we find that states that had a higher level of bachelor’s degree holders, say before 1980, experience stronger growth since then.

And a big part of that is what we were just talking about. These industries that grew the most, these industries required or else wanted very highly educated workforces, particularly people with STEM degrees. And so the states that were able to take advantage of that the most had the most educated workforces.

MARK BRODIE: What does it mean for the state and the people who live here that these numbers are what they are?

EWEN: I think people can look at this and feel good about it. I mean, a lot of people immigrated to Arizona in the past 50 years, and they’ve really helped increase standards of living in Arizona. We had some of the highest net migration rates, some of the highest population increases over the past 50 years of all of the 50 states.

And I think a lot of the people that moved here or else grew up here and stayed and built industries here, built companies, they really contributed to the growth of income in Arizona.

BRODIE: Is it possible to predict what these numbers might look like in the next 50 years? Understanding crystal balls are often cloudy.

EWEN: It’s tough. I mean, I think that there is definitely a temptation to say Arizona will continue to see strong income growth as it sees, as it has a more educated population, sees continuous population growth. The things that complicate this are one, something that’s on everybody’s mind right now is AI. How much will education contribute to economic growth in the next 50 years depends on how much an AI can do.

So, I mean, that’s one thing. Another thing is population growth has been slowing down in Phoenix in particular. But in the whole state in general, a lot of this is due to the price of housing, right. So Phoenix for a long time its strategy has been to build outward. We’re kind of reaching a limit where people maybe don’t want to live as far away from the city center as continuous outward building would require.

And so that’s going to be a limit to the extent that we can’t build more housing. That would limit population growth. It would also limit as housing gets more expensive, as demand increases for housing, it necessitates firms paying higher wages to compensate their employees for this increased cost of living. So that’s going to also increase. That will increase wages, but perhaps maybe not wages adjusted for the cost of living.