BAY LEDGER · CIVIC EVIDENCE
NELSON MANDELA BAY/

HOUSEHOLD PROSPERITY

Income shows pressure. It is not the same as wealth.

Compare household income in Nelson Mandela Bay with other metros, and understand what the available data cannot tell us about wealth.

FIELD NOTE 03INCOME & WEALTH
03 · Household prosperity

Income shows the pressure. It is not a wealth measure.

Stats SA’s 2023 Income and Expenditure Survey gives a metro-level household income benchmark. It helps describe living standards, but it does not reveal household net worth or the top 1%’s share inside Nelson Mandela Bay.

Household income by metro · 2023

Switch between median (the middle household) and average annual household income. Values are nominal 2023 rand, not inflation-adjusted.

MetroMedianAverage

Source: Stats SA, Income and Expenditure Survey 2022/23. Median is the better measure of the typical household; a high mean can be pulled upward by a smaller number of high-income households.

How to read this for the Bay

R106,354
median household income per year
≈ R8,863 per month in 2023 rand
R204,186
average household income per year
≈ R17,016 per month in 2023 rand
1.92×
average divided by median
A skew signal, not a percentile estimate
6th / 8
metro median-income position
Among the eight metros in this survey
What this cannot say: income is a flow; wealth is the value of assets minus debts. Stats SA did not publish reliable Census 2022 household-income data because of data-quality concerns, and this survey does not provide Nelson Mandela Bay top-percentile net-worth shares. A headline about the Bay’s “top 1%” would need a different, defensible dataset.

Who lives in the metro? · Census 2022

Black African 62.7%Coloured 19.2%White 15.7%Indian/Asian 1.2%Other 1.2%

Census 2022 also recorded 49.2% of households as female-headed and an average household size of 3.9. These are demographic descriptors—not evidence of who receives better service or owns more wealth. The available metro income figures do not show a reliable income-by-population-group or top-percentile breakdown.

The municipal service story intersects with household resources: outages and poor billing can impose extra time and cost, but these city-wide income estimates do not identify which wards or income groups bear those costs.