Income and inequality historical data explorer

The Institute for Fiscal Studies collates and shares historical data on UK income and income inequality. It's brilliant data so I've made a data visualisation to match.

Starting with Harold Wilson in 1964 I show how UK inequality has changed under every UK Prime Minister. By plotting this against the inflation-adjusted disposable income of households at each income percentile I show how families from poorest to richest have fared under each Prime Minister.

5th percentile 10th percentile 15th percentile 20th percentile 25th percentile 30th percentile 35th percentile 40th percentile 45th percentile 50th percentile 55th percentile 60th percentile 65th percentile 70th percentile 75th percentile 80th percentile 85th percentile 90th percentile 95th percentile Show me UK inequality vs. household disposable income at the

Source: IFS. Graph by: @thomasforth

What are percentiles? Line every household in the UK up from poorest to richest and the median household is the one in the middle. We can also call this the family at the 50th percentile of household income. But what if we want to look at poorer households? Or richer households? It's useful then to look at different percentiles, not just the 50th. Since there are about 27 million households in the UK there are about 2.7 million households with a disposable income below the 10th percentile. Similarly there are 2.7 million households above the 90th percentile. Pick your percentile and see how households around it have fared.

Who made this?

This page was made by Thomas Forth at imactivate using data from The Institute for Fiscal Studies.

I run the challenge team at the Open Data Institute Leeds where we work with clients from all over the world to get more value out of data. Please get in touch if we can help you with your data project.