Earned Income

What is ‘Earned Income’

Earned income is income derived from active participation in a trade or business, including wages, salary, tips, commissions and bonuses. This is the opposite of unearned income.

Explaining ‘Earned Income’

Earned income includes any income that a person or company receives for work they have done – AKA “personal efforts”. If you collect regular dividends from a stock, or receive a monetary gift, that money would be considered unearned income because you didn’t do anything to earn it.

Further Reading

  • Escaping the tyranny of earned income? The failure of finance as social innovation – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
  • Trends in park tourism: Economics, finance and management – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
  • Periodic Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) payment, financial stress and wellbeing: a longitudinal study – link.springer.com [PDF]
  • The impact of family income on child achievement: Evidence from the earned income tax credit – www.aeaweb.org [PDF]
  • Material hardship among banked and unbanked earned income tax credit-eligible families – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
  • The rainy day earned income tax credit: A reform to boost financial security by helping low-wage workers build emergency savings – www.rsfjournal.org [PDF]
  • Earned income tax credit policies: Impact and optimality: The Adam Smith Lecture, 2005 – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
  • Financial Instability in the Earned Income Tax Credit Program: Can Advanced Periodic Payments Ameliorate Systemic Stressors? – journals.sagepub.com [PDF]
  • Income mobility and the Earned Income Tax Credit: Short-term safety net or long-term income support – journals.sagepub.com [PDF]
  • The earned income tax credit and the limitations of tax-based welfare reform – www.jstor.org [PDF]