1. San Jose, California: More than $220,080
• How much money it takes to be in the top 1% in California: $453,772
• Median income in San Jose: $110,040
• Metro-area population: 2 million
It takes a lot of money to be considered rich in San Jose by the rest of the country’s standards, and this extremely affluent American city has some of the highest costs of living in the state of California and the entire nation, driven primarily by the exorbitant real estate prices and rents in the area, which soar above the national average and cater to households with the largest average disposable income of any city in the United States of half a million residents or more. San Jose is home to the headquarters of: Adobe, Altera, Brocade Communications Systems, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, eBay, Lee’s Sandwiches, Lumileds, PayPal, Rosendin Electric, Sanmina-SCI, and Xilinx.