Working family below median income, EITC eligible, SNAP/Medicaid, limited savings, paycheck-to-paycheck.
U-02 models the working family below the median household income — banked, employed, and persistently constrained. It is the canonical test corpus for EITC and CTC tax preparation, SNAP/Medicaid eligibility workflows, and the predatory-lending exclusion zone that fair-lending regulators most actively monitor.
U-02 exists because the working-poor and lower-middle-income family is the segment where tax credits do the heaviest lifting in the household's annual cash flow, and where benefits-cliff economics most distort financial planning. The EITC (refundable, with the 2024 maximum credit of $7,830 for a household with three qualifying children) and the partially-refundable Child Tax Credit can together represent 10–25% of after-tax household income — meaning the February refund is functionally the household's emergency fund, debt paydown, and security deposit all at once. The benefits cliff is the second-order problem: a small wage increase can trigger losses in SNAP, Medicaid, and Section 8 voucher eligibility that exceed the wage gain. Financial software targeting this segment must model both the refund-as-windfall pattern and the cliff-induced reluctance to accept overtime or a promotion. The corpus is calibrated to surface those exact tax-credit and benefits-eligibility edges.
The cash-flow shape is paycheck-to-paycheck by definition: median gross income of $63,926, p25–p75 of $57k–$72k. Net-worth median of $169,819 is dominated by home equity (14 of 20 homeowners — high for this income band, reflecting low-cost markets and the working-family stability the archetype models). Liquid net worth of $58k median and investable assets of $88k median put nearly all wealth into illiquid forms; the household has the assets-on-paper but lacks the cash buffer that the Federal Reserve's $400-emergency-expense survey repeatedly finds missing. Every household carries credit-card balances, 14 of 20 carry mortgages, and 8 of 20 carry auto loans — typically prime-or-near-prime since the household is banked and employed, distinguishing it from U-01.
What distinguishes U-02 from U-01 (unbanked) and S-02 (post-bankruptcy) is the stability of the banking relationship combined with the persistent income constraint. The U-02 household has been in the system for years, has a credit file, has a job — and is still constrained. That's the fair-lending and benefits-modeling profile that matters: a borrower whose underwriting metrics improve materially when EITC and CTC refunds are recognized as recurring annual income, which most underwriting models do not do. The 55% dependent rate and the family-presence in the household-type field are the structural anchors; this archetype is specifically a family, not a single low-income earner (which sits closer to U-01).
Aggregated across the 20 U-02 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
Sophia (38) and Kyle (34) are a two-healthcare-worker family with three young children (ages 9, 7, 5) on $55,086 combined income — below the corpus p25 and squarely in the three-or-more-qualifying-children EITC maximum band where the refundable credit alone can approach $7,800 plus the partially-refundable CTC across three children. Net worth of $251k is home-equity-heavy against $290k of liabilities, leaving liquid net worth of $94,569 — better than the corpus median but still thin relative to a $1.28M education-funding target and a $1.18M retirement target, both materially off-track. The small $11,994 debt-payoff goal is on-track. This is the canonical EITC-and-CTC-as-cash-flow-event household: a banked, employed, three-child family where the February refund is structurally larger than any single month's surplus, and where benefits-cliff economics on SNAP, Medicaid, and the premium tax credit shape whether a $5k wage bump is actually accretive.
Every U-02 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles drive U-02 demand. Tax-software teams — consumer tax-prep platforms and VITA-supporting platforms — use the corpus to validate EITC, CTC, and ACA-premium-tax-credit interaction edge cases, including the disqualifying-investment-income test and the qualifying-child tiebreaker rules under §152(c). State-and-local benefits-enrollment platforms (public-benefits-screening tools and Benefits.gov integrators) test SNAP, Medicaid, CHIP, and Section 8 eligibility logic against the corpus's income-and-family-size grid. Fair-lending compliance teams and CFPB-supervised lenders use it to validate that small-dollar lending products, refund-anticipation loans, and rent-reporting credit-builder tools meet applicable rate caps and do not produce ECOA-prohibited outputs.
U-02 is calibrated as the working-and-banked family, not the unbanked or recently-banked household — those are U-01. The corpus also excludes single adults at the same income level without dependents; the family-structure-with-children is a defining axis, and single low-earners belong in F-02 (gig starter), U-01, or B-01 (financial avoider) depending on the diagnostic question. Recent immigrants who happen to be low-income are better served by U-03 where the visa-and-remittance overlay is cleaner. Households that have already received SSDI or LTD and exited the workforce are HC-02, not U-02; this archetype models active employment. Finally, rural-poverty profiles with subsistence-farming or barter income are not modeled — the corpus assumes W-2 wage employment.
Income bands and family structure were anchored during v3 synthesis to the IRS EITC participation data, the Census ACS public-use microdata on working families below 200% of the federal poverty line, and the USDA SNAP household-characteristics report. The home-equity-heavy net-worth shape reflects the empirical observation that low-cost-of-living states (FL, AR, parts of CA Inland Empire) host the bulk of this income segment's homeowners. Per CLAUDE.md §9, the v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable; calibration descriptions reflect synthesis intent rather than auditable distribution-fit statistics.
U-01 (unbanked / recently banked) is the pre-banking-relationship state. U-02 is the banked working family — the credit file exists, the relationship is stable, and the constraint is income rather than access.
A-02 (single parent) overlaps on EITC and CTC but is structurally single-headed and skews slightly higher on income. Reach for A-02 when the testing question is head-of-household filing and child-support flows; reach for U-02 for two-adult and multi-child working families.
B-01 (financial avoider) covers behavioral causes of distress at similar income levels. U-02 models structural constraint, not behavioral pattern — the cash-flow story is involuntary rather than coachable.
HC-02 (SSDI / LTD claimant) is the case where disability has materially replaced wage income at a comparable family size. Use HC-02 for disability-benefits flows; U-02 assumes active W-2 employment.
U-02 — Low-Income Working Family represents the banked, employed family below the median U.S. household income. The corpus models EITC eligibility, CTC refundability, SNAP and Medicaid eligibility bands, paycheck-to-paycheck cash flow, and the predatory-lending risk zone that fair-lending compliance teams must defend against.
Lower-cost-of-living states (FL, AR, parts of CA Inland Empire) host the working family in this income band, and homeownership at $63k income is realistic in those markets. The wealth is in home equity, not in liquid savings — which is exactly the diagnostic stress for products that conflate net worth with available cash.
Implicitly. Income and family-structure are calibrated so that running the actual EITC and CTC computations against the corpus produces realistic refundable-credit values. The corpus does not encode the credits as discrete fields — that's deliberately left for the tax-software's own engine to produce, which is what makes it useful for testing.
A small wage increase can produce a larger loss in SNAP, Medicaid, premium tax credit, and Section 8 voucher value than the wage gain itself — making rational household behavior to reject overtime or promotion. Planning UX that ignores this overestimates the household's marginal propensity to save from incremental wages.
U-02 is tagged for six bundles — B04, B14, B15, B18, B23, and B29 — covering cash-flow stress, behavioral finance, healthcare planning, insurance edge cases, fair-lending compliance, and underserved/CDFI coverage.
No. The shipped v3 corpus is frozen and not regenerable from current code (CLAUDE.md §9). Sampler improvements land in a future v4 release with per-archetype golden fixtures in CI to prevent silent drift.
Download households matching this archetype as part of a Wealth Data Set.
Browse Data Sets