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The income needed to rank among America’s top 1% varies widely by state. Getty Images

Americans need about $748,000 in annual adjusted gross income to enter the top 1% nationally, but the threshold varies sharply depending on where they file their taxes, according to the latest state-level income data available from the IRS.

The figures cover tax year 2023 but were only released by the Internal Revenue Service in August 2026 as part of its Statistics of Income program. The IRS publishes the detailed state percentile tables with a lag after tax returns have been filed and processed.

Washington, D.C., had the highest threshold at about $1.1 million, while Connecticut was the only state where the cutoff also exceeded $1 million. At the other end of the scale, West Virginia's threshold was about $426,000.

The national cutoff increased only about 1% between tax years 2022 and 2023, while consumer prices rose by roughly 4% over the period. After adjusting for inflation, the income required to reach the top 1% declined by about 3%, according to Investopedia's analysis.

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The newly released IRS data also show how income sources change as taxpayers move higher up the earnings distribution.

Wages and salaries accounted for about 35% of adjusted gross income among top-1% filers nationally, while net capital gains contributed another 22%.

Among taxpayers in the bottom half of the income distribution, wages accounted for about 81% of adjusted gross income, while capital gains made up just 0.4%.

The mix varies significantly by state. In Wyoming, wages accounted for only about 11% of income among top-1% filers, while capital gains made up roughly 38%. Capital gains also represented about 38% of top-1% income in Washington, D.C., 35% in Arkansas and around 29% in Nevada and Florida.

Wyoming's highest earners also accounted for the largest share of income reported within any state. The top 1% there received about 32% of all adjusted gross income.

Nationally, roughly 1.5 million tax returns fell into the top 1% category in 2023 and accounted for about 20.6% of total adjusted gross income, down from 22.4% a year earlier.