How much you need take home to be in the top 1 percent of earners in each state

The top 1 per cent – it is a phrase you hear a lot, especially since politicians like Bernie Sanders began repeating it at rallies. But what does being in the exclusive club actually look like?

Researchers from the Economic Policy Institute found out the minimum a person would have to earn to count themselves among the top percent in each state, and uncovered a discrepancy even among the very richest.

Mississippi is where the bar to entry drops lowest, with someone having to earn just over $250,000 per year to qualify as among the most valuable in the state.

But in Connecticut, that salary is nowhere near the top end of the scale, with people here having to earn at least $700,000 each year to count themselves among the very richest.

The study also established what the average actual salary of the top 1 per cent was in each state.

Unsurprisingly Connecticut comes out on top again, with an average salary of $2.5million but coming in second was New York with an average of $2.2million.

That is despite the fact that New York has a minimum salary of $500,000 to join the 1 per cent club, meaning a huge discrepancy between wages paid to the very top earners.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the amount of wealth concentrated in the state, California did not rank in the top five either in terms of salary required to join the 1 per cent club, or average 1 percenter salary.

In its research, the EPI singled out Jackson, WY as the most unequal location in the entire country. The data was complied using tax returns from 2015.

Taken across the whole of America, you need to earn a salary of $421,926 to count yourself among the top 1 per cent, while the bottom 99 per cent earned an average of $50,107 per year.

An EPI spokesman told CNBC: ‘In 2015, the top 1 per cent of families in the U.S. earned, on average, 26.3 times as much income as the bottom 99 per cent.’