B Evidence Grade B Verified accuracy verified by the review judge Safe to Cite Dated

37%

37% -- share of total consumer spending for top-earning US households (2002)

Name: Share Of Total Consumer Spending Statistics
Creator: Lighthouse Intelligence
Published: 2026-09-19

2002 · Harvard Business Review

Top-earning US households accounted for 37% of total consumer spending in the United States.

Defines top earners as the top quintile of US households (earning over $84,016 in 2002 real dollars).

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Attribution: Harvard Business Review View source

Lighthouse Research Team

Last verified: 2026-09-19 · How we verify data →

Source verified Evidence graded

Value

37%

Unit

Percentage

Data Vintage

2002

Entity

top-earning US households

Evidence Quality

Strong, reliable evidence

Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.

65/100 confidence

Single source - not yet corroborated

Score breakdown

Extraction

Source Trust

Citation Chain

Independence

Methodology

Freshness

Source

Harvard Business Review Primary Tier B

http://hbr.org/2004/07/selling-to-the-moneyed-masses/ar/1 ↗

Confidence: 71/100 Vintage: 2002 Channel: Common Crawl

Source Article

Selling to the Moneyed Masses

Original Research

Harvard Business Review · Original study ↗

Methodology

Consumer expenditure analysis for top income quintile

Methodology documented

Segmentation

Industrymarketing

Cite this stat

Plain Text

top-earning US households: 37% share of total consumer spending. Source: Harvard Business Review (2002). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/top-earners-share-of-us-spending-2002

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<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/top-earners-share-of-us-spending-2002" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>37%</strong> -- share of total consumer spending for top-earning US households<br><small>Source: Harvard Business Review (2002) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/top-earners-share-of-us-spending-2002" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>

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