Twenty-three dollars and one cent. 

That’s how much money a Sullivan County adult living on their own with no dependent children would have to make per hour at a full-time job to meet what the mathematicians at MIT call the “minimum standards of living in their community.”

Created at MIT more than two decades ago, the Living Wage Calculator puts a number on the salary a full-time worker in the US would need to make to cover or support the costs of their family’s basic needs where they live. 

The calculator takes a variety of factors into account, from the number of children someone has to whether or not there is another working adult in the household, layering in the costs of basics like food, childcare, medical expenses, and more, to come up with an estimate of not just a living wage, but a poverty wage. 

For Sullivan County, that $23.01 figure would cover that single adult without kids, but plenty of adults require sufficiently more to cover the basics. Are you a single parent with two kids? The MIT math says you need to make $52.07 an hour to make ends meet. 

A working parent with two kids in a home where one adult stays home? They need to make $43.10 per hour. In their situation, making $15.46 an hour puts them squarely in what MIT calls the poverty wage bracket. 

In fact, the lowest dollar figure that the folks at MIT estimate a Sullivan County resident can make per hour at a 40-per-hour job and still eke by is $16.27, a number they say is livable ONLY if you have no kids AND live in a household of two working adults, in which that second adult earns at least as much as you do. 

The minimum wage here in Sullivan County (and across upstate) is $15.50.

You do the math.