When you enter your income into our calculator, your result is only as meaningful as the data it's being compared against. That data comes from the PSA Family Income and Expenditure Survey — commonly called FIES — and it's worth understanding what it actually measures.
What Is the FIES?
The Family Income and Expenditure Survey is a nationwide household survey conducted by the Philippine Statistics Authority every three years. It is the most comprehensive and authoritative source of household income and expenditure data in the Philippines.
The 2023 edition — which powers this tool — covered approximately 55,000 sample households across all regions, provinces, and urban/rural classifications. The results are statistically weighted to represent the full population of roughly 28 million Filipino households.
What Does It Measure?
FIES captures a remarkably detailed picture of household finances, including:
- Income sources: wages and salaries, entrepreneurial income, OFW remittances, rental income, pensions, and other transfers
- Expenditure patterns: food, housing, education, transportation, healthcare, clothing, and recreation
- Household characteristics: size, composition, location, and employment status of members
This breadth is what makes FIES uniquely valuable — it doesn't just tell us how much households earn; it tells us how they live, what they spend, and where their money goes.
How We Use FIES in This Calculator
We use the FIES 2023 income distribution data to construct a national income percentile curve. When you enter your household income, we calculate where it falls on that curve — giving you your percentile rank among all Filipino households.
We also use FIES expenditure data to power the lifestyle affordability cards in your results — the estimates for what households at your income level typically spend on food, rent, transportation, and savings.
Limitations to Be Aware Of
No dataset is perfect. FIES has known limitations that are worth understanding:
- Self-reporting bias: High-income households tend to underreport income. The very top of the income distribution is likely underrepresented.
- Informal economy: Income from informal or undeclared sources is often omitted, which may cause some households to appear poorer than they are in practice.
- Survey lag: The 2023 data reflects conditions in that year. Significant inflation or economic shifts since then may reduce precision.
- Three-year cycle: FIES is conducted every three years, so the data is never perfectly current. We apply an inflation adjustment factor to help bridge this gap.
Why Not Use a More Recent Source?
The short answer is: there isn't one. FIES is the only nationally representative household income survey in the Philippines. Annual data simply does not exist at this level of granularity and coverage. The PSA does publish interim estimates, but they lack the regional and expenditure detail needed to power the features in this tool.
The 2023 FIES remains the gold standard for understanding income distribution in the Philippines — and we will update this tool when the 2026 survey is released.