Cost benefit analyses (CBA) often rely on stated preference methods to elicit the non-market preferences of the population. Because those preferences are expressed as willingnesses to pay, they depend on the marginal utility of income, inducing a non-democratic weighting of preferences. While this issue has been acknowledged in the CBA literature, we find a new distorting effect of income on preferences coming from the introduction of subsistence needs. First, we provide a methodological framework showing how non-market preferences and pricing depend on the level of subsistence needs and income. Then, we quantify the importance of these impacts by comparing this framework with the standard framework. Our findings confirm the necessity of accounting for subsistence needs when relying on stated preferences, especially for CBA.