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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Please note that in Germany and many other European countries, the net income is usually after taxes and mandatory insurances like health insurance, pension insurance, unemployment insurance or long term care insurance.

For a married couple without children, 5160 EUR net income per month then equates an income of over 100,000 EUR per year.

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yeah, this number seems high. It might not look high to the overseas visitors to HN, but in Europe that's well paid!

> in Europe that's well paid

Well paid but not upper class. Give Germany has a bona fide upper class, this is a meaningful point to snuffle about. The couple with €5,160/mo. in net income is still, in all likelihood, beholden to their employer.

The study defines upper class as top 10% of net income.

> The study defines upper class as top 10% of net income

And the comments in this thread are disagreeing with that terminology. (The term of art has been “high earners” when I’ve seen income statistics in America.)

The study itself actually distinguishes upper class (Oberschicht) from the top income decile (which is what the research is about). At any rate, that's really a semantic issue and should not distract from the substance.

5160 € net would be incredibly much in Finland. A single guy would have to bring home roughly 115,000 € = 128,600 USD gross annually for that.

That would put you close to the 1% of the top earners in Finland. Even most mid-sized company CEOs don't make nearly that much.

The value of 5160€ is for couples.

Yep, so both would have to be working at very well paying jobs to bring anywhere near that level net income home.

100K EUR is a high income relative to the median but not compared to the actual upper class.

It might get you a mortgage on a 500K EUR home. Maybe.

Now consider everything above that, farmland, companies, warehouses, etc. Not some theoretical tiny portion, but actually a load of stuff above that.

Leaving aside any form of apologism if you define 100K as upper class you now have no term to describe those that are actually rich.

> if you define 100K as upper class you now have no term to describe those that are actually rich

We've got plenty (you even used one, "rich"). "One percenters", "millionaires", "wealthy", "upper upper class", etc.

I don't know if it is a cultural difference, but here in euw, in my country in particular, we usually use a similar definition for upper class and we call the class of the actually rich just like it, "the rich".

For reference, 120k€ (before taxes) could be a couple of software engineers with normal mid-level or low senior-level salaries (at least for Berlin, don’t know about other places).

it's closer to 110K. German taxes and other fees are on Scandinavian level.

If the couple is married and only one of them is earning money, 5160 EUR net income per month may be generated by less than 100k EUR total income per year (its roughly 98k).

This is mainly because your non-earning spouse can be included in your health care insurance for free, and because of the Ehegattensplitting [0]

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehegattensplitting

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