It's important to realize this is just one measure of income distribution, and not necessarily used to determine wealth or wellbeing. The social policy people who use these figures are well aware of the sorts of pressure points that individuals experience, like diffrences in cost of living etc. I started the thread mostly because there has been lots of debate in the past about what exactly is a high income and what is middle income, which of course is always going to be relative to many other things.