Derived from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys, published annual means by income quintile (LABSTAT bulk series, not microdata). After-tax income minus spending on five categories: food at home, housing, transportation, healthcare, and personal insurance and pensions. Constant 2024 dollars, deflated with CPI-U annual averages; the deflator choice is ours, not BLS's. The construction reproduces all three figures the St. Louis Fed published for 2023.
Two caveats worth carrying if you reuse this. These are spending categories, not a test of necessity, so a bigger mortgage counts in full. And the series is volatile year to year, so a ten-year comparison is a fair summary rather than a trend line.
The window cannot be extended past 2023 because NBER stopped updating the TAXSIM model BLS used for after-tax income.
Free dataset, CC BY 4.0, with methodology and a data dictionary:
efficientdollar.com/data/leftover-money-after-essentials(https://efficientdollar.com/data/leftover-money-a
