The 20 richest stations of the Brussels metro

The figure shown is the median net taxable income per tax declaration for the statistical sector the station sits in, from Statbel's fiscal statistics on income (income year 2023). The statistical sector is the finest geography Belgium publishes income at, roughly 700 of them in the Brussels-Capital Region alone, and it describes the neighbourhood rather than the riders. One detail that matters: this is a median per tax declaration, not per household. A jointly taxed couple counts as a single declaration. It is close in spirit to the household medians used for Paris, Madrid and London, but it is not the same variable, so the amounts are not directly comparable from one article to the next. The ranking traces the far side of the croissant pauvre very clearly. Schuman comes first at 35,849 EUR, and that is the EU quarter: the figure describes the residents of the sector, not the tens of thousands of people passing through the station every day. Behind it the whole top of the table heads south east, with Beaulieu and Herrmann-Debroux in Auderghem, Vandervelde, Tomberg, Roodebeek, Gribaumont and Joséphine-Charlotte in Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, Montgomery and Stockel in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. Line 1 toward Stockel and line 5 toward Herrmann-Debroux take most of the list, rounded out by Louise and Trône on the central axis. Leaving aside Alma, a special case covered in the poorest-stations article, the gap between the top and the bottom of the network stays moderate, a factor of 1.8 against Étangs Noirs. One methodological caveat to close on: sectors with fewer than 200 declarations are discarded, and the station then takes the nearest qualifying sector within 1,500 m. Sixteen of the 59 stations fall into that case, Schuman among them. Without that floor the Palais Royal sector and its 23 filers came out as the second-richest station in Brussels, and a hospital campus came out as the poorest. A median over two dozen tax returns is noise, not a neighbourhood.