On the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Republic, questions remain about the degree to which the 1979 revolution was able to create a fairer and more meritocratic society. Much current political discourse focuses on the rise of a new hereditary class of political and business elites. Yet, many scholars have also pointed out how policies implemented after the revolution, such as educational expansion, rising state employment and increased fiscal redistribution, brought down poverty and illiteracy rates and, in various ways, improved the relative position of disadvantaged groups such as the poor and women. Given these contrasting perspectives, I ask two questions. What are the chances for ordinary people in today’s Iran to experience upward class mobility? And are disadvantaged groups currently better situated to make use of opportunities, compared to the pre- and early-post-revolutionary past? To address these questions, the paper makes use of a novel dataset, the 2016 Iran Social Survey. The first of its kind in Iran, this large nationally-representative survey includes a range of questions on the social background of respondents as well as their parents and grandparents. I look at the degree to which individuals coming from lower social classes were able to move up in society in the post-revolutionary period in terms of jobs and educational credentials. On the one hand, I find that expansion in the absolute size of the educational system enabled lower classes, and particularly poor women growing up in the 1990s, to experience rapid upward mobility, relative to the more privileged. On the other hand, using conditional logit modelling, I argue that improvements in occupational mobility have been much more constraint. Similar to many developing and oil-rich countries, Iran’s labor market has reproduced a rigid occupational structure in the post-revolutionary period, making it hard for individuals from lower social classes to move up the ladder. I conclude by offering preliminary evidence that the revolution nonetheless put some lower classes, such as landless farmers, in a position to make better use of occupational opportunities.