Even in Boston, someone making $150k-$300k would be making as much as two to five median households combined (depending on where in that spectrum and whether you're using Boston proper or the metro area). I don't find the term "middle class" useful if it's so broad that it includes nearly everyone, including those several times richer than those in the actual middle. I get that the "hockey stick" graph of wealth in this country is what prevents us from agreeing on definitions, since my "upper class" would lump together many orders of magnitude of wealth -- your terminology is more fine tuned for describing differences among the sliver at the top, where mine is more about providing proportional social units distributed across the population. By the way, I don't find the non-wealth defintion of class in this country to be as useful as wealth-focused definitions. Sure, there's still some snobbery in this country, but for the most part income matters a whole lot more than background. This isn't like the UK where CEOs and most of the ruling class come from posh families born with the right connections and wielding the perfect accents and cultural shibboleths. So, although I'd look past fortune for my terminology in the UK, here money is the key factor.