NEW DELHI: Bengaluru, Chandigarh and Delhi have the highest average income in the country, while Chandigarh, Thiruvananthapuram and Vadodara top the charts on average household spend, a report by data outfit PRICE and Tata Sons, accessed exclusively by TOI, has shown.When it comes to overall demand, the country’s top six cities – Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad – account for 46% of the total consumption and two-thirds of the urban consumption.Within this, Delhi NCR is by far the biggest consumption base: At $126 billion it is as big as the combined heft of Mumbai and Bengaluru, which adds up to $134 billion. Now, that’s because of the population, as NCR has 7.5 million households compared with 4.6 million in Mumbai.When it comes to scale, NCR households annually spend over $33 billion on transportation – larger than Pune or Ahmedabad’s total consumption market.
Top 100 cities drive 31% of consumption
The report, ‘Many Urban Indias’, by PRICE’s Rajesh Shukla and Tata Sons’ Rupa Purushothaman and Vishal Vaibhaw, has estimated data for 2025-26 on the basis of household-level microdata from the four PRICE’s ICEO 360-degree surveys between 2014 and 2023 and supplemented it with numbers from govt surveys.It estimated that India’s top 100 cities account for less than a fifth of the population but generate over a third of the income and account for 31% of the consumption. It has classified cities into Big Six (over 10 million population with an average annual income of Rs 23 lakh), Boomtowns (such as Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Surat and Pune that are home to 2.5-10 million population and the average income is Rs 17 lakh), Breakout Cities (1.5-2.5 million population and Rs 14 lakh annual income) and Frontier Cities (0.5-1.5 million population and Rs 12 lakh average income).The report said that the share of middle-income households (Rs 6-36 lakh) has nearly doubled from 29% to 53% in the past decade, and by 2030, they are projected to be 60% in the top 100 cities. Currently, Hyderabad has the highest proportion.When it comes to high-income (over Rs 36 lakh), their share has increased from 3% to 12% in the last 10 years and is likely to near 20% by 2030. While Delhi, Mumbai and Pune are on top, cities like Raipur, Thoothukudi and Kannur are among the fastest growing not only in this segment, but also among middle-income households.The report also said that low-income households will disappear by 2030, at least in the top 100 cities, with the share of those with less than Rs 1.5 lakh falling to 0.3%.
