While I don’t doubt that for earners, but do you have a cite for that with regards to pensioners? I would expect their income to remain static, and net worth to gradually decrease then precipitously decrease once care home costs kick in.
I think that’s his point. The OP specifically asked about earners. TimeWinder gave a wrong answer about the population of the US. You gave a correct answer about the population of the US. Both you and TimeWinder ignored the fact that the OP asked about earners.
According to the SSA, there were 160,794,699 wage earners in the US in 2015. That means the top 1% of earners in the US would be 1,607,947 people.
The table doesn’t break down exactly 1% but you can see that the point where it tips over from not-quite-99% to just-over-99% happens in the 250,000.00 — 299,999.99 row. If you add up everything larger than that row, you get 1,403,575 people earning an average of $658,417 each. If you add up everything including that row, you get 2,024,266 people earning an average of $540,095 each.
So, to answer to the OP, based on the SSA’s 2015 numbers, if you earn more than $300,000 per year then you are definitely in the 1%, and if you earn somewhere between $250,000 and $299.999.99 you might just barely be in the 1%, especially if you’re near the top of that range. Using linear interpolation, we’d expect the breaking point to be right around $266,463.
Here’s my short answer:
>How much does an individual need to make in order to be in the top 1 percent?
$266K per year in the US
>How many top 1 percent earners are in this country?
1.6 million in the US
And those 1.6 million earn, on average, about $600K per year.
You made $290k per year? Or you worked for the Census bureau?
I agree with your overall post. But to be fair to the folks coming up with different numbers, the OP asks three different questions. He probably sloppily thought they were all the same, but they’re not.
Typically the “1%” terminology and similar is not even about income at all. It’s about net worth. So his title really asks: “What is the threshold net worth to be in the top 1% of net worth?”
Then he asks with a little more specificity: “How much does an individual need to make in order to be in the top 1 percent?” To me at least, this is clearly about income, not assets. But (to me at least) he’s asking about all sources of income, both wages and investments.
Finally, he asks his most specific question: “How many top 1 percent earners are in this country?” Which seems to me to be asking about wage earners, and to have switched from “What’s their threshold W-2 income?” to “How many are there?”
Three very different questions with three very different answers. I doubt the OP understood those differences while he was typing, but IMO there they are.
Regardless of those quibbles, for sure there are not 450 million Americans. Yet.
Fair enough; I forgot about post-retirement trends. It would add another interesting segment to the plot.
Closer to $240K between my wife and I. Hey, I actually did work for the census folks during the 2010 cycle. It was interesting to a genealogist in a $16/hr sort of way.
Here is a simple calculator to see where you fit in. It says $450k income in 2014 put you in the 1%.
$240K for two wage earners is only $120K each. That’s well below the “top 1%” level. It almost gets you to the “top 5% level”, but not quite.
I was responding to what another poster said.
The first part of that doesn’t follow from the second (not saying it’s false, just that you can’t conclude that). The membership of the top ranks is fairly volatile; any given individual may only be a 1%er, or a 0.01%er, etc. for a single year, or a handful of years in their lifetime. Also, incomes at these levels are highly dependent on the stock market, which is also volatile. The markets did well in 2012, but not in 2011, which explains at least part of the jump. But cherry-picking such cases doesn’t say much about the overall trend.
Have the numbers for the top 1 percent changed much in over a year? Have the Trump tax cuts made a difference?
It’s good that I didn’t draw that conclusion then. In an English paragraph the sentences may complement each other in various ways. Connective words are often used to refine meaning. The following sentences are not equivalent:
The girl was cute, but she had freckles and green eyes.
The girl was cute, because she had freckles and green eyes.
The girl was cute; she had freckles and green eyes.
You seemed to be using the second sentence as supporting evidence for the first. If not, the claim is a non sequitur. And in any case, the claim can’t be shown from the data provided. One needs to know the actual makeup of the cohorts and track households over time to see if there’s been a change in income inequality.
Note that I think it’s almost certainly true that inequality has been increasing. I’m just being nitpicky.
Come back after you Google “supporting evidence” and “conclusive proof” and are ready to explain the difference. 
I admit to being a bit snippy. But note that my post #17 contained more complete factual answer to OP’s question than all the rest of the thread put together. My post was completely ignored until your response, Dopers going on to post snippets of information already contained in the comprehensive #17. And your response, rather than thanking me for #17, was to misconstrue my paragraph and address a fault that wasn’t there.
But this is SDMB, and I expected nothing less. 
Nobody has this kind of instantaneous visibility of individual income. The latest IRS reports are for 2015.
I think when people calculate income for these sort of statistics, they usually use pre-tax income. The link that septimus gave was using Adjusted Gross Income, which is affected by the tax code because it includes any deductions you have, but it is still pre-tax.
Missed the edit window. For example, my AGI will rise this year not because I’ll make more money, but because my SALT (State And Local Taxes) deduction will be limited to $10K. That means I have less take home pay, even though my AGI is higher (the lower tax rates offset the loss of deductions somewhat but not fully).
Not only is wealth not the same thing as income, but neither is the same thing as economic status. It’s possible to be rich, even filthy rich, with very little income and zero or negative wealth. This is a lot more difficult to quantify, though.
I was just thinking that same thing. Our fearless leader allegedly once claimed to be poorer than a homeless man because he (the leader) had a net worth of negative four billion dollars at the time. Yet he was riding in limousines, eating foie gras and caviar, flying in a private jet, and shitting in a gold toilet. Net worth is often a negative number for members of the middle class too, despite living a comfortable lifestyle, driving a decent car, never going hungry, always able to see a doctor, able to take two weeks of annual vacation from their job (or possibly retired). Contrast that to a poor person who rides public transit, often skips lunch because they simply don’t have $6 for a sandwich, can’t pay the deductible on their health insurance, never gets any vacation unless you count staying home with the flu, and has a net worth of zero because they have very little assets and very little debts (largely because no one will loan them any money due to their low credit rating).
We really need a better metric for what it means to be rich. But I don’t know how to decide what the metric should be. Who was the jackass that recently suggested that poor people aren’t really poor because 97% of them have a refrigerator? I can’t remember. The point is, if you start brainstorming ideas for what really measures how rich or poor you are, some people are bound to suggest some ridiculous ideas and then you’ll have arguments about what’s ridiculous and what isn’t.
One metric I’ve seen used lately is “If you had a sudden unexpected doctor bill for $400, could you pay it right now without dipping into your savings, yes or no?”. That’s a pretty good one. And recent data shows that, despite the unemployment rate being very low (the lowest point since Bill Clinton was President), the percent of Americans who answer yes to that question hasn’t gone up.