Income deciles

The income distribution is described by means of tenths or deciles. Sometimes fifths or quintiles are also used, formed in the corresponding way as deciles.

An example of how income deciles are formed:

Nowadays the decile groups or income deciles used in the income distribution statistics are formed by dividing first the household's income by the household's consumption units (so-called equivalent income). Each household member will have the same equivalent income. The persons are then arranged in the order of their income and divided into ten groups of equal size. Each income decile then has 10 per cent of the population. The first income decile contains the lowest income tenth and the last one the highest income tenth. The income shares of income deciles show how large share of the total sum of the income in question each decile gets.