Between bare subsistence and social respectability lay a range of material conditions that shaped the lives of working families in preindustrial societies. This article reconstructs a socially recognized benchmark of respectable living for mid-eighteenth-century Seville using Arriquibar’s contemporary household budget and expenditure records from the Royal Seminary College of San Telmo. Taken toghether, these two sources yield an annual cost of more than 5,000 reales de vellón for sustaining a household at that level in the 1760s, roughly twice Allen’s respectability line and well above existing Spanish estimates. The analysis also considers a reduced variant without domestic service, which allows for a more graduated picture of what respectability cost and who could afford it. These results suggest that this threshold stood beyond the means of most urban working households, with implications for domestic demand in eighteenth-century Spain.
