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Objective To provide quantitative evaluations on the association between income inequality and health.

Design Random effects meta-analyses, calculating the overall relative risk for subsequent mortality among prospective cohort studies and the overall odds ratio for poor self rated health among cross sectional studies.

Data sources PubMed, the ISI Web of Science, and the National Bureau for Economic Research database.

Review methods Peer reviewed papers with multilevel data.

Results The meta-analysis included 59 509 857 subjects in nine cohort studies and 1 280 211 subjects in 19 cross sectional studies. The overall cohort relative risk and cross sectional odds ratio (95% confidence intervals) per 0.05 unit increase in Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, was 1.08 (1.06 to 1.10) and 1.04 (1.02 to 1.06), respectively. Meta-regressions showed stronger associations between income inequality …