Measuring the middle class

Increasing the size of the middle class is said to be a national objective for the Philippines. This piece scans the state of the art of gauging class sizes.

The level of schooling is a simple proxy for class. It is straightforward and easy to measure. The latest national survey of adults by Social Weather Stations (SWS), fielded last March 24-31, found 37 percent as junior high school (JHS) dropouts at best, which to me is definitely lower class; it is shockingly high. The 30 percent who finished their JHS but not senior high school (SHS), the 25 percent who finished SHS, and the 8 percent who finished college are sources of the middle classes but may not all be there yet.

The Self-Rated Not Poor (hindi mahirap), as surveyed by SWS, is an implicit indicator of the sum of the middle and upper classes. To me, not only the Poor, but also the Borderline, are definitely NOT middle class. The share of the Not Poor used to be quite small, but has recently been growing, from the ranks of the Borderline (“First Quarter for 2026 Social Weather Survey: Self-Rated Poverty (SRP) at 52% on March 2026: Borderline at 13%, Not Poor at 35%,” www.sws.org.ph, 5/7/26).

The great advantage of the Not Poor number is that it has been surveyed quarterly, for decades, up to the present. It is available for the whole nation and for four geographic areas. It is tabulated with all other SWS well-being indicators

A direct, bottom-up, measure of the sizes of six social classes is periodically available from the social inequality module of the International Social Survey Program (issp.org). This module was most recently done in 2019, for 39 countries, including the Philippines (by SWS—each ISSP member institution finances its own survey, by the way). The ISSP’s six-class distribution for the Philippines, for 2019, is:

1. Lower Class (mababang klase), 35.7 percent; 2. Working Class (klase ng mga manggagawa), 14.0 percent; 3. Lower Middle Class (mababang parte ng gitnang klase), 28.9 percent; 4. Middle Class (gitnang klase), 17.6 percent; 5. Upper Middle Class (mataas na parte ng gitnang klase), 3.2 percent; and 6. Upper Class (mataas na klase), 0.5 percent. The original British-English phrasing is ISSP-decided, as a group; each country implementor does the translation.

Note that this ISSP item provides three separate middles, which altogether add up to 49.7 percent in the case of the Philippines; the Lower Middle is very large, while the Upper Middle is quite small. The Lower and the Working classes happen to add up to 49.7 percent also. The balance of 0.5 percent is Upper class. The word “class” has no special definition; it is whatever the respondents understand by it, so I give the Filipino version for clarity. The limitation of the ISSP measure is the long wait between replications, perhaps once a decade.

An indirect, top-down, measure of the sizes of seven income classes is available from the Philippine Institute of Development Studies (pids.gov.ph). The income data are from the government’s Family Income and Expenditures Survey, now done every two years, since 2021 (but 2025 is not yet ready). The class-definitions are the personal responsibility of the researchers, led by former national statistician Jose Albert, who linked them to the official poverty line (P13,873 per month per family in 2023) by means of multiples.

Here are the seven classes, their titles, and the class distribution for 2023 (Source: Deanne Lorraine D. Cabalfin, Jose Ramon G. Albert, and Mohammad A. Mahmoud, “The middle class and vulnerability to income poverty: implications for social protection in the Philippines,” PIDS, January 2026):

1. Poor, less than the poverty line (PL), 10.9 percent; 2. Low-income, between one to two times PL, 37.8 percent; 3. Lower middle-income, two to four times PL, 33.3 percent; 4. Middle-middle income, four to seven times PL; 5. Upper middle-income, seven to 12 times PL, 12.4 percent; 6. Upper-income, 12 to 20 times PL, 1.2 percent; and 7. Rich, at least 20 times PL, 0.4 percent.

Note that the three middle classes, as designed by the researchers, add up to 49.7 percent. The two classes below them make up 48.7 percent, and the two classes above them make up 1.6 percent.

The old-fashioned ABCDE system, originally created by market surveyors, has survived. It is essentially dwelling-based, where survey interviewers subjectively judge a household’s class according to the neighborhood, the durability of home construction, and how well the home has been maintained. The A- and B-dwellings are upper-class, the Cs are traditionally called middle class, the Ds are the biggest class, called the “masa,” and the Es are the very poor.

But the system is very subjective, with each survey company having its own style of applying it. Another problem is that the Ds have become too dominant, often reaching 75 percent, while As, Bs, and Cs are so few that they get clustered together as ABC, in order to have any statistical reliability.

The Philippine Statistical Authority (PSA) has long aimed for a unified Socio-Economic Classification system, called 1SEC, with a prescribed set of objective indicators, including home assets, as basis. When PSA demonstrates that its 1SEC works, by applying it to its own household surveys, then probably the private survey industry will follow.

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