Net Disposable Income in the United States, Germany, and France: Household income by quintile after taxes, transfers, and privately borne healthcare, education, and retirement costs, 2022

This study compares household income across the income distributions of the United States, Germany, and France, fifth by fifth. Incomes are re-based to post-fiscal cash — income after taxes and after cash and near-cash transfers — and three costs that standard measures omit are then subtracted: measured household spending on healthcare, including household-paid premiums; measured household spending on education; and a pension-security deduction built from the voluntary retirement saving US households make toward benefits the German and French mandatory systems provide automatically. The result is termed Net Disposable Income (NDI), stated per equivalent adult at purchasing-power parities built from the prices households pay. On the corrected cash baseline, the claim that the US leads at every fifth does not survive: Germany leads the US bottom fifth. After the three deductions, Germany leads the US bottom fifth by USD 4.0K and, on the mid-case, the second fifth by USD 2.2K; France leads the bottom fifth by USD 1.4K on the mid-case, and the US–France second fifth is essentially even, and the US leads from the middle fifth upward, with the middle fifth carried as a central estimate inside overlapping ranges (USD 2.8K mid-case lead over Germany and USD 5.9K over France at the middle; USD 11.9K and USD 16.4K at the fourth; USD 84.5K and USD 92.7K at the top). Sweden is carried as a named boundary case in a methodology section: a cash measure cannot yet certify a service state on the data available. Searches of the published and working-paper literature completed August 30, 2026 identified no study that subtracts privately borne healthcare, education, and retirement-saving costs from post-fiscal cash income by quintile in a comparison of the United States and European countries. Files in this version: the working paper (PDF) and the traceable model workbook (Excel), in which every figure in the paper is keyed row by row to named public sources.