About 4.7 billion people are in the global consumer class

About 4.76 billion people now belong to what economists call the global consumer class: everyone who spends at least $13.20 a day². That is a little more than half of humanity, and the class grows by a massive 120 million people or so a year, about 330,000 a day¹.

No government counts consumers. The figure comes from World Data Lab, a company founded in Vienna in 2014 by Homi Kharas and Wolfgang Fengler, two economists who had worked at the World Bank¹². It estimates how many people spend how much in each of 190-odd countries and counts those above the line².

Most consumers only just clear the line. By World Data Lab’s bands for 2026, 2.9 billion people spend between $13.20 and $45 a day, 1.1 billion between $45 and $90, and about 650 million more than that. Below the line are 3.5 billion people².

What $13.20 a day buys

A consumer, in this sense, is someone whose spending goes beyond the basics. Kharas, who first measured the global middle class this way, put the threshold where a household no longer risks falling back into poverty and can afford “a range of consumer durables and services”¹¹. World Data Lab now draws it at $13.20 a day per person, in 2021 dollars adjusted for what money buys in each country².

By rich-world standards it is a modest life. The line sits at about two thirds of the US poverty line, which for a family of four in 2021 came to about $19 per person a day, by our arithmetic on the Census Bureau’s figure. That is a line for income rather than spending, so the comparison is only rough¹⁷.

Spending changes just above the line. Among the very poor, ownership of fridges, vehicles and air conditioners barely rises as incomes grow; above a first threshold it climbs fast, then levels off¹⁶. Households entering the middle class buy consumer durables, and also services such as tourism, entertainment, health, education and transport¹¹.

Household surveys count 3.3 billion consumers, not 4.7

The global middle class, as the economists who coined the term count it, is the consumer class: about 4.7 billion people on World Data Lab’s count. The World Bank, which counts poverty from household surveys, puts only 3.27 billion people, 39.5% of the world, above the same $13.20 line in 2026¹⁴.

The gap comes from method. World Data Lab scales its figures so that they add up to the household spending in each country’s national accounts, the official statistics a country uses to calculate its GDP². Surveys record less. Across more than 2,000 surveys since 1990, the World Bank’s own researchers found survey spending averaging 26% below the national accounts, roughly half of it because the two measure different things¹⁵.

India shows how much that matters. The World Bank’s estimate puts 3.9% of Indians above the line in 2024; World Data Lab puts 46% there in 2026¹⁴². The gap matters most where many people sit just below the line, as they do in India, so a modest difference in measured spending moves a large share of the country across it. This page uses World Data Lab’s count because the consumer class is its definition, and because it is the only body that publishes a projection.

More than half the world is now in the consumer class

About 57% of the world’s people are in the consumer class, by World Data Lab’s count: 4.6 billion of 8.1 billion in 2025⁵. The share has been rising along with the number. On the World Bank’s stricter survey measure it went from 23% in 1990 to 28% in 2010 and 39.5% in 2026¹⁴.

Growth only took off around 2000. Until then, on an earlier version of the line, the consumer class was about 1.7 billion people, most of them in the West⁹. The survey series barely moved between 1981 and 2000, and has climbed almost every year since¹⁴.

The other side of the count is people who spend less than $13.20 a day: about 3.5 billion on World Data Lab’s count². On the World Bank’s survey measure there are about 5 billion, a number that has barely moved since 2010 because population growth has kept pace with people moving up¹⁴.

Most new consumers live in India, China and the rest of Asia

About four in five new consumers live in Asia⁴. India and China alone account for six in ten of the 113 million people expected to join in 2026, about 40 million and 28.5 million. The rest of Asia adds 20 million, Africa 15 million and Latin America 6 million³.

That has turned the class around. In 1980 more than 70% of consumers lived in the rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); by 2020 the OECD’s share was down to 40% and Asia’s had reached 50%⁹. Within Asia and the Pacific, more than half of all people were in the consumer class by 2023². How that is changing the continent is on the page for Asia.

Joining is not permanent. In 2020 the pandemic pushed 65 million more people out of the consumer class than came in, and the 2021 rebound brought in 256 million¹. The oil price shock of 2026 is another test: World Data Lab’s severe scenario, with oil above $120 a barrel, cuts the year’s newcomers to 72 million⁴.

Five billion consumers by 2028

World Data Lab expects the consumer class to pass 5 billion people in 2028⁵. On its projected additions of about 123 million a year after 2026, the class would reach about 5.1 billion by 2030, by our arithmetic¹.

From about 4.66 billion on 1 January 2026, that path adds between three and four people every second. It is a commercial forecaster’s projection, not a count, and the oil shock has already trimmed it.

Older figures can’t be compared with it. Brookings’ estimate of 3.5 billion consumers in 2017, rising to 5.6 billion by 2030, was on a line of $11 a day in older prices¹⁰. When World Data Lab moved to 2021 prices in 2025, its count rose from about 4.2 billion to 4.6 billion, and by our arithmetic roughly 270 million of that was the change of prices, not people⁶⁵.

Air conditioners first, then cars

What new consumers buy uses a great deal of energy, and the clearest case is cooling. Of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, only 8% had an air conditioner in 2018, against 90% of households in the United States and Japan; in India it was 4%¹⁸. This is the threshold at work: once household incomes pass a certain level, the International Energy Agency (IEA) found, air conditioner sales take off¹⁸.

The IEA expects the world’s stock of air conditioners to grow from 1.6 billion to 5.6 billion by 2050, the equivalent of ten new ones sold every second for 30 years¹⁹. In its main scenario, 90% of the growth in ownership over the next decade is in emerging and developing economies²⁰.

Cars follow the same curve. There are about 1.4 billion on the road, but only one for every ten people in emerging and developing economies, against five for every ten in advanced ones²⁰. The average person in those economies uses about 42 gigajoules of energy a year, against about 110 in advanced economies, and the IEA expects that to rise as households buy vehicles, air conditioners and other appliances²⁰.

A small affluent minority does most of the spending

The consumer class is really two classes. About 657 million affluent consumers, spending $90 a day or more, will spend $35.9 trillion in 2026, in today’s dollars, more than the $31.6 trillion spent by the 4.1 billion others in the class put together. The figures are World Data Lab’s, in a report with the market researcher NIQ⁷.

Emissions are split in a similar way. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the 10% of households with the highest emissions per person cause 34 to 45% of the greenhouse gases from household consumption, the middle 40% cause 40 to 53%, and the bottom half 13 to 15%²¹. The richest 1% alone account for about 15%, on the World Inequality Lab’s latest estimate²³.

Flying is more lopsided still: in 2018, 1% of the world’s people produced half of all the carbon dioxide from commercial flights²².

The IPCC puts the bottom half at less than $3 a day and the top tenth at more than $23²¹. That suggests the $13.20 line falls somewhere inside the middle 40%, though the two use different price years, so most newcomers probably arrive among the middling footprints. What they aim for is often set by the top: the IPCC notes that the lifestyles of the affluent “often influence the growing middle class”²².

A bigger consumer class needs more materials and energy

As incomes grow, spending on energy-hungry goods grows faster still, so footprints rise more than in proportion to income²².

The International Resource Panel, a UN body, tracks the material footprint: the raw materials extracted worldwide to supply what a country’s people consume. Upper-middle-income countries, which include China, Brazil and Mexico, have more than doubled theirs per person since 2000, and buildings and transport make up 68% of it. In 2000 high-income countries used 51% of the world’s materials and upper-middle-income countries 34%; by 2020 those shares had practically swapped²⁴.

The gap per person is still wide. People in high-income countries use six times the materials and cause ten times the climate impacts of people in low-income countries²⁴. Added up across everyone, humanity’s demand on nature comes to about 1.7 times what the planet regenerates in a year¹³, a measure explained on the page for how many Earths we need.

Most of the growth in that demand is now coming from where the consumer class is growing, judging by the doubling of material use in upper-middle-income countries and the IEA’s expectation that energy use per person rises there as households buy their first cars and air conditioners.

Where the consumer class could take the planet

Whether a bigger consumer class wrecks the climate depends on how its newest members live and on how its richest ones change, and the evidence pulls both ways. Ending poverty costs the climate very little: lifting more than a billion people out of it would add only 1.6 to 2.1% to global emissions²⁵. The IPCC concludes that, in the near term, decent living standards for the 41% of people who live in the lowest-emitting countries can be reached without significant growth in global emissions²¹.

A step further up is a different matter. A 2017 study found that raising the poorer half of humanity to between $2.97 and $8.44 a day, in 2011 prices and still short of the consumer-class line, would add about 0.6 °C of warming by 2100 if energy kept coming from today’s sources²⁶.

There are reasons to expect the newcomers to live differently from the old consumers. Electric cars are already more than 40% of the car market in Viet Nam, and air conditioners far more efficient than the average model sold today are on the shelves at little or no extra cost²⁰. In the rich world, at least 18 countries have cut the carbon dioxide behind what they consume for more than a decade²¹, and material use per person there has stopped rising²⁴.

None of that has yet bent the global total. The International Resource Panel finds “no evidence of widespread absolute decoupling at the global level”, meaning no sign yet of the world using fewer materials in total as it grows richer²⁴. With roughly half a billion more people likely to join by 2030 on World Data Lab’s projections¹, much will turn on the power plants, cars and air conditioners that India, China and the rest of Asia build and buy in the next few years, and on how far the affluent minority, whose footprints are still the heaviest, cuts its own.