Though deficient in their overall income totals, the social tables of King (1688) and Massie (1759) indicate that English labouring families earned about a third of the average for all households. Assuming an average household of five and an average per capita national income of £12-15 over most of the century, such families might thus be expected to earn around £20-25 or £4-5 per person, an estimate that agrees well with mid-century male wages of 16d in towns (Phelps Brown & Hopkins 1956) and 11d in the countryside (Allen 2005; Clark 2007), assuming two working members: (women generally received less for their work than men, as of course did children).

Prices were of course low by our standards, at least before the increases of the 1790s, but even then it was a struggle to support a family even on £25 a year in the 1750s-60s or £30 by the 1780s. Diets were predominantly basic, with little available for non-essentials. Bread or other cereal dishes - the source of the overwhelming majority of necessary calories - would alone consume a third or more of annual household income, meat and dairy produce each well under half as much, meat less still, though in an age still without safe drinking water supplies, beer remained a must.

Among non-food costs totalling over a quarter of income, clothing and bedding bulked largest at probably a tenth or more, followed by fuel (generaly reckoned among commentators at a twentieth or so) and candles & soap. Rent weighs in surprisingly low by today's standards, the annual value of housing having been estimated at only 5% of national income by King and a mere 3% by Arthur Young c.1770 (the latter probably an understatement), against 8% in the latter half of the 19th century (Deane &n Cole 1962): poorer families may have paid a higher share, but what they could afford was constrained by the little they had left for anything after food necessities.