The 10 Richest Cities in Washington for 2024

In this article, we'll look at the top 10 richest cities in Washington and explore some of the demographic statistics of each to see if we can find out why they are the richest.

Before we get started, let's talk about how we determine "the richest cities" by explaining how we calculate it.

We use the mean household income for each city, which can be found on the latest American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates. The ACS is an ongoing survey conducted by the US Census Bureau and, because it's updated yearly, is more up-to-date that the Decennial Survey.

The latest year we have ACS data for is 2022.

Using the mean (or average) household income, we only really have two criteria to determine the richest cities:

  1. The city must have a population of at least 500 people.
  2. The margin of error provided by the Census Bureau for the city must be less than 50% of the mean household income estimate.

Richest Cities in Washington

If you're in a rush and just want to see the top 10 cities in Washington, here they are, sorted by highest average household income.

The list is long, so you might have to scroll the table to see all of the cities. You can click the links in the table to view more demographic statistics about the city.

Rank City County Mean Income
1 Clyde Hill King County $483,738.00
2 Medina King County $439,677.00
3 Yarrow Point King County $421,181.00
4 Woodway Snohomish County $344,325.00
5 Mercer Island King County $290,655.00
6 Sammamish King County $261,753.00
7 Newcastle King County $229,812.00
8 Snoqualmie King County $222,021.00
9 Bainbridge Island Kitsap County $214,501.00
10 Bellevue King County $208,947.00

Demographic Statistics for the 10 Richest Cities in Washington

Now that we've seen the top 10 cities in Washington, let's take a look at some of the demographic statistics for each city.

We'll focus on the top 10 richest cities in Washington to see if there any similarities or differences between them.

Household Income by Age

In the table below, we can compare the household income by age for each of the cities.

City Under 25 25 to 44 45 to 64 65 and Over
Clyde Hill $0.00 $250,001.00 $250,001.00 $205,250.00
Medina $0.00 $213,889.00 $250,001.00 $166,964.00
Yarrow Point $0.00 $250,001.00 $250,001.00 $119,583.00
Woodway $0.00 $242,500.00 $229,375.00 $143,750.00
Mercer Island $68,947.00 $232,875.00 $250,001.00 $97,849.00
Sammamish $90,787.00 $245,174.00 $223,042.00 $126,029.00
Newcastle $0.00 $160,129.00 $183,906.00 $75,903.00
Snoqualmie $0.00 $180,833.00 $195,329.00 $0.00
Bainbridge Island $0.00 $164,603.00 $194,808.00 $107,909.00
Bellevue $74,231.00 $167,300.00 $184,754.00 $82,617.00

Note than any fields showing as $0 are because the data was not available from the latest ACS.

We can see from the data above that the most common age bracket for the richest cities in Washington is 25 to 44, with 40.00% of the top earners falling into this age bracket.

The list below shows all of the top age brackets for the richest cities in Washington.

  • 40.00% of the richest cities in Washington were aged 25 to 44
  • 60.00% of the richest cities in Washington were aged 45 to 64

Race and Ethnicity

We can also look at the race and ethnicity for the richest cities in Washington. To do that, we created averages for each race reported for the city by the ACS survey.

The chart below shows the most common races living in the richest cities in Washington:

  • 96.58% Black/African American
  • 63.52% Native
  • 24.48% Other
  • 3.16% Hispanic
  • 1.24% White
  • 0.87% Asian
  • 0.10% Two or more races
  • 0.09% Hawaiian/Pacific Islander

This shows that the most common race across the richest cities in Washington is "Black/African American".

Education Levels

Another interesting demographic to look at would be the education levels of the people living in the richest cities in Washington.

Just like we did with the race and ethnicity numbers, we can create averages for each of the education levels the Census Bureau tracks for each city, by summing them and dividing by the number of cities we're comparing.

The chart below shows the most common education level of people living in the richest cities in Washington:

  • Bachelor's degree
    51.32%
  • Master's degree or higher
    35.15%
  • High school diploma or equivalent
    8.88%
  • Some college or associate's degree
    3.61%
  • Less than high school diploma
    1.04%

The data shows that 86.47% of people living in the richest cities in Washington have a bachelor's degree or higher.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this article has given you some interesting insights into why the richest cities in Washington are so wealthy based on the common demographics between them.

In the future, we will try to add more data to this article and pull out more interesting insights from the information.

Link To or Reference This Page

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  • "The 10 Richest Cities in Washington for 2024". NameCensus.com. Accessed on April 25, 2024. https://namecensus.com/demographics/washington/richest-cities/.

  • "The 10 Richest Cities in Washington for 2024". NameCensus.com, https://namecensus.com/demographics/washington/richest-cities/. Accessed 25 April, 2024

  • The 10 Richest Cities in Washington for 2024. NameCensus.com. Retrieved from https://namecensus.com/demographics/washington/richest-cities/.