Growing up in the 80s, big shots were described as having a “six figure salary”. Online inflation calculators tell me that if I’d heard that in 1988, such a person would be making about 280k now.
But things are also more expensive, especially housing. What’s someone got to make to be the 2022 equivalent big shot?
I’m thinking 400k.
It depends on the location. I make 6 figures, but live right outside DC. While we live comfortably, we’d be a lot more comfortable in most other areas.
$280,000 is still a six figure salary.
Unless I’ve been misunderstanding what it means, I’ve always been under the impression that someone taking home six figures isn’t making 100k, but somewhere between $100,000 and $999,999.
If you’re just asking what a big salary would be called now, if not six (or seven) figures, I’d probably phrase it as something like ‘they’re making over a million dollars a year’.
I don’t think the range is important, it’s just the threshold at which someone is making an amount of money that’s simply unobtainable to most people. Just like now, there’s very little difference to me between someone making 400k and 800k a year. I can’t fathom how their lives would be different. But 100k and 400k is a huge difference.
I guess I never read it as an abstract term. The threshold is, and always has been, $100,000. It’s not something subject to inflation. Asking what a six figure salary is today vs 30 years ago is like asking how many grams were in a kilogram in 1980 compared to today.
I can see where you’re coming from, but to me there’s still a line in the sand at $100,000.
Just for context, growing up in the late 70’s in Bellevue, WA we were definitely upper middle class because my dad made $52,000 per year gross. That a whole thousand dollars a week. 
As a line of dialog it absolutely matters.
Eta: inflation, that is.
I also heard six figure salary as meaning you were doing very well. But the median income in Santa Clara county is now over $100K, and government workers can get housing assistance at $80K.
When JFK became president he made $100K, which was big bucks in 1961, not that he needed it.
Maybe $280K is the new $100K through inflation, but I think $400K is more like it.
Just used an inflation calculator and my dad’s $52,000 would be $260,000 today. I don’t know how much the house I grew up in cost my parents in the 70s but it is well over $1M today. I remember my mom buying Thanksgiving Dinner fixings. I mean ALL the trimmings and that was $50 which was an outrageously high grocery bill in the day. Would those same groceries cost $250 today? Gas was well under a dollar and is about 5X more today. All this being said, I posit that a “six figure salary” from the 1970s is equivalent to $500,000 to $5,000,000 today
Median income is still only around $34k (mean around $50k). So even today, $100k a year is still a fair amount of money.
Even back in the 80s, I didn’t think “six figures” was considered a “big shot”. I thought it was considered sort of a lower threshold to “doing ok”, in a sort of bourgeois upper middle class sense. Like it buys a lawyer a decent condo and an entry level Mercedes.
I think if this quote from Wall Street (1987):
“If you’re not inside, you’re outside, OK? And I’m not talking a $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff flying first class and being comfortable, I’m talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars. buddy. A player, or nothing.”
– Gordon Gekko
The point is, real “big shots” aren’t really thinking in terms of annual income.
I still remember one Jack Webb voiceover from the opening of a Dragnet episode: “This is the city, Los Angeles, California. Homes here go for upwards of a hundred thousand dollars.”
mmm
A six-figure salary is a salary that can be expressed in six decimal numbers. Unfortunately inflation has wreaked havoc on the meaning of that expression. Here in Ontario, anyone being paid directly or indirectly by the provincial government who earns more than $100,000 is publicly identified on something called a Sunshine List. The trouble is that the list now totals some 437,000 individuals, so it’s not exactly an exclusive club of those supposedly enjoying public largesse any more. It includes nurses, police officers, and many other ordinary workers now.
High six figures?
Isn’t that what inflation means?
I think taking a look at salaries of the type of people you’re talking about is a good metric. Doctors, lawyers, or software engineers that are doing well are going to be making a couple hundred thousand a year.
I think I’d also agree with ~$400K. So, maybe “mid-six figures”?
One way to think of it is in terms of what proportion of jobs earned that rate
From this cite, when we look a the top 5% of non-Hispanic white earners, which is probably the best apples to apples comparison, their income was 89.2K in 1980, and was 95K in 1989. Today its 286.7K. A simple linear extrapolation give you 321K, if you use the lower quartiles to fit a quadratic model that accounts for increasing inequality, you get 333K.
In the movie Serial, which came out in 1980, Martin Mull’s character was a mid-level manager who was disparaged in an interview because he didn’t ‘earn his age’. Apparently, the mark of success was to be making more than $40,000 per year as a 40-year-old, $50,000 as a fifty-year old, etc.
I don’t know if this was an actual thing or just made up for the movie, and I’m guessing that was out of date by 1980 - the script was probably written a few years earlier, before inflation had really taken off. For 1975, that statement might be a reasonable approximation of what reasonably successful mid-level managers or executives might have expected.
In comparison, a 1975 Cadillac DeVille could be had for about $12,500. A typical basic car from Ford or Chevy would be around $4,000-$5,000. So a guy 40 years old making $40,000 could buy a new car with a little over a month’s gross pay. Today, if you make $100,000 you can still buy a cheap new car for a little more than a month’s gross pay.
To @Snarky_Kong’s point - I think the term “six figure salary” was really a synonym for "reasonably successful working professionals.
I think the equivalent term used these days is “the 1%”. Which would be between $300k-$500k , depending on what state you live in.
Location definitely matters.
Our house in the frozen tundra would go for maybe $400,000 (Look! Six figures!). My kid’s looking at a smaller house near L.A. for 1,500,000. Our reasonable salaries are plenty to pay the mortgage here. In LA, the kid can’t look at jobs that pay less than five times our two incomes together!
The “six figure” salary there isn’t enough to own a house that’s livable. Our five figures is more than enough here.
I have a friend from Old Money, and we call him “Our One Percenter.” He does things like get trapped in an underground garage because he only carries his Adamantium Amex Card and can’t get out.
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Welllll, I had a boss in the early '80s who delighted in telling employees that they’d “never earn their age” (even wonderful ones like moi). I was so glad to leave and be offered a salary “over my age” at the next job (in your face, Billy Boy!).
By the way, this was Assoc. Creative Director for an ad agency, so should’ve been higher; you can blame it on it being a small town midwest company.