Income and wealth percentile in Mexico

What the numbers say about Mexico.

Mexican median income is around Mex$167,500 per adult, roughly $9,200 at current exchange rates. The average sits at Mex$468,000, nearly three times the median. That ratio places Mexico among the most unequal economies in Latin America, even after a decade of slow narrowing. The economy runs on three things. Manufacturing exports to the United States under USMCA, oil and remittances on the macro side, and a very large informal services sector that employs roughly half the workforce.

The north-south divide runs through every economic statistic. The northern border states (Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Baja California) have integrated deeply with US supply chains. Monterrey hosts industrial conglomerates and a significant high-end services sector. The maquiladora belt employs hundreds of thousands in electronics, automotive, and aerospace assembly. Median wages in Nuevo León run roughly double the median in Chiapas or Oaxaca. The southern states show development indicators closer to Central America than to northern Mexico, with high indigenous populations, low formal employment, and weak public services.

Remittances from Mexicans working in the United States have become a structural part of the income picture. Roughly $63 billion flowed back in 2023, equivalent to about 4 percent of GDP and several times direct foreign investment. The flow concentrates in Michoacán, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Oaxaca, where it often supports household consumption, small-scale construction, and informal-sector business creation. Remittance income does not always show up cleanly in formal-sector statistics, which understates the actual living standards of recipient households.

Wealth concentration at the top is sharper than in any peer economy of similar income. The top 1% threshold for wealth sits above Mex$16.6 million, with the top 0.1% above Mex$92 million. Carlos Slim's América Móvil and Grupo Carso, the Servitje family's Bimbo, Germán Larrea's Grupo México, and a small set of regional banking and retail families dominate the top of the distribution. Many of these fortunes trace to the 1980s and 1990s privatisations of state-owned firms, which created a generation of very large industrial holdings concentrated in a small number of hands.

Two themes shape the next decade. Nearshoring, the relocation of manufacturing from China to North America, has lifted industrial investment in Monterrey, Querétaro, Saltillo, and the wider Bajío region significantly since 2022. And security conditions in several states remain difficult, which limits where productive investment can credibly land.