FOR MANY RESIDENTS, the Bay State has a “good on paper” problem. Massachusetts is well-educated, well-insured, well-employed, and relatively prosperous.
It is also very expensive. People here can have a nice life – if they can afford it.
In a new poll on the middle class, Massachusetts residents report financial anxiety, driven by a cost of living that feels difficult to manage even for people who say they have relatively good standards of living. The state has preserved its middle class, or at least the proportion of people who identify themselves as middle class, but few residents describe having the kind of financial flexibility to think much beyond paycheck-to-paycheck.
The survey of 854 Massachusetts residents (Topline | Crosstabs) conducted for CommonWealth Beacon and WBUR by the MassINC Polling Group finds that most people still describe their quality of life as decent — 69 percent rate it good, very good, or excellent. But that assessment is shot through with precarity.
Forty-two percent say they are worse off financially than they were a year ago. Forty percent expect to be worse off a year from now.
Over the last decade and change, the self-described class composition of Massachusetts has barely budged. About 40 percent of residents identify as middle class, 32 percent as working class, 13 percent as upper middle class, and 11 percent as poor — figures nearly identical to what The MassINC Polling Group found when it first asked the question in 2003. The middle class has not collapsed.
But residents have growing doubts about whether the state is structured in their favor. And affordability remains the buzzword of the moment as Gov. Maura Healey and her GOP challengers battle it out over plans to manage energy, health care, transportation, and housing costs.
For residents like Cherise Kenner, life hovering around the middle class is “just stressful in general, especially living in Massachusetts. Costs are high, high taxes, even the deduction from my paycheck seems high, and that comes with stress,” she said. “I do the best that I can.”
In some ways, the 44-year-old single mother of two is feeling better positioned now than she was just a few years ago. She has a condominium in Hyde Park, which feels like something she can leave her children. She still has a full-time job that pays just well enough.
But Kenner is now wrestling with credit card debt and struggling to maintain a pot of savings and stay on top of bills.
She’s a long way from how she grew up — raised by a single mother in a Section 8 apartment — but not yet where she wants to be.
“I think I’ve accomplished a lot for where I am financially, compared to where my parents were,” she said. “I think it’s commendable — a little bit of debt, a little savings, but I’m definitely trying to have a healthier relationship to my finances.”
Experts describe the feeling as a pile-up of costs, with spiking gas prices, a dire housing crunch, and a weak hiring market. The Bay State has some of the highest energy prices in the US, needs 222,000 more homes by 2035 to meet demand, and is trying to weather major policy shifts to its core “meds and eds” sectors that have lost federal funding and struggle with fewer workers or students due to immigration policy changes. Even residents who say they appreciate the state’s lauded health care system report skipping or delaying care for cost reasons.
“It’s easy to empathize with people who feel the economy has grown increasingly precarious, because the economy has grown increasingly precarious,” said Evan Horowitz, executive director of the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University. “So it seems sensible to look around and say things aren’t dire — I have a stable job, I can pay my bills – and yet not with as much certainty as I had last year.”
The sense of being on the edge of comfort and financial security cuts across income brackets in the poll.
That anticipatory pessimism represents a significant departure from where residents stood a decade or so ago in prior MassINC Polling Group polls. In both 2011 and 2013, more than half of respondents said they expected to be doing about the same financially in a year. But in the years since, the group saying it expected to be doing about the same has shrunk 21 percentage points.
Those saying they thought their financial situation would be better in a year rose slightly, up about 5 percentage points since 2013. But the number of people saying they expect to be doing worse jumped 23 percentage points.
“We’re seeing people being much more pessimistic about the economy right now, given inflation and some of the choices that the [Trump] administration has made, as well as sort of a longer term shift in the view of whether or not people expect the economy to be stable,” said Marta Churella, senior research director at The MassINC Polling Group.
While the early 2010s marked a move out of the Great Recession and housing crisis, coupled with a sense of cautious optimism about national economic recovery, people now describe an economic dread.
“I think that people’s experiences during Covid and the years following have had a big impact on the way that people think about their own economic futures,” Churella said. “There’s a lot more expectation that there may be economic shocks, and situations that previously felt economically stable don’t feel so secure given the fact that people have a lot more trouble saving money for emergencies.”
Generational comparisons have shifted as well. Asked whether they are financially better or worse off than their parents were at the same age, about a third of respondents landed on each side — 32 percent better off, 33 percent worse off. In 2011, half of respondents said they were financially better off than their parents, and only 22 percent said they were worse off.
The cost of the middle-class life
The security of middle-class life is typically defined by a good job, class mobility, and wealth security, said Christian Weller, a professor of public policy and department chair at UMass Boston. Weller, who focuses on wealth inequality, retirement savings policy, and economic policy, says there has been a pronounced shift in the way people talk about being middle class.
“People increasingly define middle class not by material things, but more ‘Am I secure? Are my kids taken care of? Can they go to college? Can I retire?’” he said. “They’re not thinking about a boat. A boat is nice, but ‘Can I have health care?’”
These days, “people don’t feel secure except some at the very top,” he added.
When asked to define what a middle-class lifestyle actually looks like in Massachusetts, respondents converged on a familiar set of markers: a steady full-time job (41 percent), earning enough for basic needs (39 percent), a comfortable place to live (38 percent) or homeownership (38 percent). Saving for the future ranked high as well, at 30 percent.
Respondents offered an array of potential visions of a middle-class life.
A Generation X woman in a one-income household bringing in between $75,000 and $100,000 a year, who said her household is “securely in the middle class,” said middle class is having “just enough and working hard for it.”
For one Baby Boomer man who, making more than $500,000 a year, described himself as “upper middle class,” being middle class means a “basic life and education. Just over blue collar.”
A Generation X man in a two-earner household making $150,000 to $200,000 a year placed his family between middle and working class, defining middle class as “okay to survive with a bit of saving.”
A millennial man making between $250,000 and $300,000 a year described himself as being “in danger of falling out of the middle class” and described a middle class life as having “undergrad done with no loans, condo/house, car, kids, and a visible and credible road to retirement.”
Yet residents also described many of these markers as out of reach.
Half of respondents said housing was unaffordable to their household, and among residents aged 35 to 44, that figure climbs to two-thirds. Forty-eight percent said higher education is unaffordable. Forty-six percent said the same about taxes. Close to half say health care, car ownership, and even going out to dinner or a movie strain their budgets.
The effects compound over time. Fifty-three percent of respondents say their financial circumstances have either prevented or delayed them from saving for retirement. Forty-one percent say the same about buying a home.
Asked what they would do if they had more financial breathing room, residents’ top priority was not spending money on travel or nicer things — it was saving more for the future, ranked first by 41 percent of respondents. Improving their housing situation came second.
While the most common definition of being middle class was essentially feeling comfortable, being able to pay your bills, and having a little bit left over, Churella said, some respondents seemed to feel the bottom of the middle class floating just beneath them.
“There’s a share that we’re seeing in our research who describe themselves as being in the middle class because they no longer qualify for public assistance,” she said, “and so they very much feel the precarity of, yes, they’re able to pay their bills, but they have absolutely no buffer.”
The feeling of unease regardless of bringing in $75,000 a year or $300,000 a year partly reflects a “polarization bias” in a blue state while the federal government is under opposing party control, Horowitz said.
But there is also an economic crunch that people are seeing in their normal lives, he said.
“Hiring rates are weak for people who are doing well and people who are doing badly,” he said. “It’s hard to feel secure at any rung of the ladder because we’re in a moment where if you fall off the ladder, it will be hard to get back to that same rung quickly.”
A state that works better for some
Half of the polled residents said Massachusetts is a better state to live in than the rest of the country — for wealthy people. For everyone else, pluralities say it is worse: worse for the middle class (38 percent), the working class (44 percent), and the poor (43 percent).
The comparison between Massachusetts and other states can be messy, Churella noted. There are quality of life upsides and downsides to an expensive state with more social supports.
“I think they’re seeing their own struggles and their peers’ struggles, and saying, ‘Well, the wealthy aren’t struggling the way that we are today,’” she said. “I see it as more of a sense that Massachusetts, or where they live right now [in the state], doesn’t feel particularly stable for them.”
Asked which group state government currently prioritizes, a quarter of respondents said the wealthy. Only 9 percent said the middle class. Residents are clear about what they want instead: 72 percent said they would like to see state government focus on the needs of the working class and poor.
Massachusetts could do better but has a lot going for it when it comes to low-income supports, Weller said. There are security nets like paid family medical leave, a good Medicaid system, and good unemployment benefits — in theory.
But the middle-class mobility question is key, he said.
“There’s that sort of feeling that there’s some people who have made it,” while others haven’t, Weller said. “And this has been around since at least the Great Recession… that mobility is much lower than it has been in previous generations.”
There was a brief moment of recovery, he said, where people had “money in the bank [and] things felt possible.” But high levels of inflation and tariffs have increased costs while Trump administration policies have weakened two of Massachusetts’s main economic sectors: higher education and biotech.
This was a sort of “head spinning change,” Weller said, “from things could have been good to things aren’t great and people can’t get a job.”
It’s the gap between having enough to live and enough to live slightly larger that seems to be the definitional tension in the polling. Only 15 percent of respondents said they made enough to pay their bills with “plenty left over.” A plurality (42 percent) said they had a little left over, 29 percent said they had just enough to pay their bills, and 13 percent said they didn’t have enough.
Asked what would make her feel “secure,” Kenner had a quick, decisive answer ready.
“Having enough savings,” she said. “I would be okay with what I’m making and things I’d be able to do, if I just had that cushion of emergency funds and savings, pots of savings for my children. Just knowing that is there, I would be fine living paycheck to paycheck.”
