BEA: Taking Economic Statistics Personally Since 1938

A blog from BEA Director Vipin Arora

When I hear the phrase “personal income,” I think about my paycheck. When we talk about personal income in the context of BEA’s economic statistics, however, it’s my paycheck, your paycheck, your cousin’s paycheck—and much more. In fact, I believe our monthly personal income statistics are the most comprehensive measure of U.S. economic activity available on a monthly basis. They are also a widely used tool for analyzing consumer purchasing power.

What is personal income? It’s income that people get from wages and salaries, Social Security and other government benefits, dividends and interest, business ownership, and other sources. Not only do we produce monthly estimates for the entire country, but we also produce quarterly estimates of personal income for individual states , and annual estimates down to the level of counties . We even have annual estimates of the distribution of personal income to households.

It turns out that we’ve been publishing personal income statistics for a long time. The origin and evolution of these statistics are, for me, a textbook example of listening and responding to the needs of customers. Our initial estimates of monthly personal income (then called monthly income payments) were released in February 1938 in response to a policy need for more timely information on the economy. Shortly afterwards, in response to calls for more regional information, we published the first annual statistics on state income payments in 1939 .

Users were also very interested in timelier statistics that more closely aligned with income available for saving or spending. We responded in 1942 by publishing our first monthly estimates of disposable personal income—the amount that U.S. residents have left to spend or save after paying taxes. Annual estimates of state disposable personal income followed in 1956 . And in 1953 we produced our first national estimates of the distribution of personal income. These are just a few early examples of how BEA’s personal income estimates have continued to expand and improve in response to user needs.

Those users can be found all over the world. Our estimates of personal income are closely followed by businesspeople, Wall Street investors, policymakers, and the public. State and local personal income numbers also help the United States allocate hundreds of billions in federal funds to state and local governments each year. And our estimates of wages and salaries are used in projecting federal budgets and Social Security trust fund balances.

BEA’s personal income statistics have helped capture the interplay between Americans' incomes, spending, and saving for nearly 90 years—and will continue to do so into the future.

This blog was originally published on August 5, 2024, to bea.gov .