Chapter 7 Means Test: Where Your Income Sits

One row of one table: the U.S. Trustee Program's Census median family income for the state you choose, for cases filed on or after July 15, 2026. It lists households of one to four and adds $11,100 for each person above four; every figure in your result is that row's cell, or the cell plus the add-on, and the line tells you which.

The household question ends at five or more, placed at five; your result then lists the medians for six, seven and eight people. Because the median only rises with size, a band below the five-person median is below it for every larger household, and your result says so where it holds.

Your band is compared in annual dollars: its lowest and highest monthly amounts, times twelve, against the median. If all of it is under the median, you see below; if all of it is over, you see above; and if the median falls inside your band, you see too close to call, with the median printed so you can set it against your real number. A band is only a stand-in for current monthly income, which Official Form 122A-1 works through line by line.

Your result says where your band falls and what uscourts.gov says about that side, nothing more: above the median, the Bankruptcy Code requires the means test, net of allowed expenses and secured debt payments. This check does not run those later lines.

Your property, your debts, prior bankruptcy cases, the expense side of the form and whether your debts are primarily consumer debts. Each can change what the means test and your case decide, none is asked here, and your result says so on every answer, so a below-the-median line reads as one comparison, not an outcome.

It shows no court filing fee and no fee waiver line; the free cost to file estimator in this section adds those to the same median row, and your result links it with your state preset. A lawyer's fee is separate from the court fee.

The U.S. Trustee Program updates the median table about April 1 and November 1; the July 15, 2026 update is in force, and the state chart in this section shows all 51 rows, and for a household of four they can run from $93,672 in West Virginia to $178,524 in Massachusetts. The two sentences about filing come from uscourts.gov, read on October 18, 2026; every row was checked on October 14, 2026.