The top 1 percent in the city received about 32.5 percent of all income in 2009, compared with under 17 percent of all income for the top 1 percent of earners nationwide.

The threshold to reach the top 1 percent in the city may have risen back above $500,000 since 2009, but the tax data for 2010 will not be available until later this year. “I’m curious to see what happened in 2010, when incomes apparently rebounded,” Mr. Braconi said.

The comptroller’s report also revealed that New York had a smaller bulge in its middle than the rest of the country. Nationally, about 31 percent of filers earned $50,000 to $200,000, and they took in 52 percent of all the personal income in the country. In New York, just 28 percent of filers fell into that income bracket, and they collected only 36 percent of all the personal income in the city.

“New York City’s economy would be healthier and more dynamic if the benefits of growth were more fairly distributed,” said the comptroller, John C. Liu. “We need to promote a shared prosperity through policies that narrow the income gap, like strengthening investments in education and implementing a more progressive income-tax structure.”

Mr. Liu, a Democrat who hopes to run for mayor, has proposed cutting taxes for New Yorkers earning less than $500,000 a year and raising taxes for those earning more than that amount.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has repeatedly stated his opposition to raising taxes only for the wealthiest filers, and has advocated allowing the broad, temporary tax cuts enacted when George W. Bush was president to expire.

Republicans have also made use of city income-tax data to support their arguments. Late last year, Councilman James S. Oddo, a Republican from Staten Island, asked the city’s Independent Budget Office to analyze the 2009 filing data. The budget office found that the top 1 percent of filers received over one-third of all personal income and had an average income of almost $2.25 million.