Previous studies suggest that in more unequal countries people tend to perceive stronger antagonistic relations among opposing socioeconomic groups. Given that income inequality and social polarization have both been on the rise in most Western democracies, we expand on this body of work by investigating whether changes in levels of macroeconomic inequality lead to higher levels of perceived social conflict. To do so, we fit hybrid multilevel models using time-series cross-sectional data from 27 countries spanning over three decades (1987-2019). Main results suggest that rising income inequality increases perceived social conflicts between socioeconomic groups over the long-run. Altought income inequality has a positive and sizeable effect on the salience of vertical social conflicts, the gap in conflict perceptions among socioeconomic groups seems to decrease as inequality rises. These results, robust to alternative model specifications and placebo robustness checks, contribute to a growing scholarship on the social and political implications of rising economic inequality.