A growing body of research attempts to reconcile economic and cultural explanations of populist radical right (PRR) voting by highlighting citizens' resentment against their gradual marginalisation within society. Nonetheless, widespread speculations about the deteriorating relative economic position of PRR voters are not supported by proper empirical evidence. To address this shortage, the present study first provides a theoretical discussion of the electoral consequences of economic status loss by bridging multidisciplinary literature on relative economic inequality and group deprivation; subsequently, it assesses such consequences empirically, by means of a novel measure of economic status loss. Our multilevel analysis on ESS and EU-SILC data on 19 elections (2008-2017) across 9 Western European countries demonstrates that PRR parties are most successful among social classes facing a collective decrease in economic status – rather than material deprivation per se. More specifically, voters from social classes that have moved farther away from the affluent than from the poor in income terms feature higher chances of voting for PRR parties. This result is robust across several model specifications. Additional analysis reveals that this finding is not driven by any specific electoral alternative, that is neither the left nor the centre-right taken individually. Furthermore, our analysis does not confirm that the experience of material deprivation at the class level affects PRR voting, which is consistent with prior studies. This result is consequential for scholarly debates on the reasons for class PRR alignment and on the electoral repercussions of economic inequalities.