Three people live on the same street. All you can see is what each one earns. Going on that alone, who looks highest up the class ladder?
Class is not your salary. It runs on three kinds of capital (Bourdieu, 1979): economic (money), social (who you know), and cultural (the tastes, credentials, and institutional know-how you grow up with).
Cultural capital is the engine. It is the part that passes quietly from parents to children, and that schools and employers reward as if it were pure merit (Lareau, 2002). Dave earns the most but holds the least of the kind that actually hands advantage on. Priya earns the least, yet is the best placed of the three to pass her advantages to her children.
That is why salary brackets, and what people say about their own class, both mislead. Read people by all three capitals, not the figure on the payslip.