Poverty rate, explained

What it measures

The poverty rate is the share of people whose family income falls below the federal poverty line. The poverty line is a dollar threshold set each year by the US Census Bureau and the Department of Health and Human Services; it varies by family size and age composition. For 2024, the poverty line was roughly $15,000 for a single adult under 65 and roughly $31,000 for a family of four with two children. A person is "in poverty" if their entire family's annual income falls below the threshold for that family's size, the determination is made for the family as a whole, not for individuals one at a time.

The poverty rate is computed for the population whose poverty status is determined, which excludes people living in dorms, prisons, nursing homes, and a handful of other group settings. The Census Bureau publishes poverty rates for the United States, every state, county, metro, city, ZIP code, and census tract.

There are two parallel poverty measures published in the US. The "official" poverty rate uses the threshold-based approach above and is what the ACS publishes for local areas. The newer "Supplemental Poverty Measure" (SPM) adjusts for taxes, in-kind benefits, geographic cost-of-living differences, and necessary work expenses; it is only published nationally. Unless otherwise noted, every poverty rate on this site is the official measure.

Why it matters

Poverty rates drive a substantial fraction of federal spending. Title I school funding, Medicaid eligibility, SNAP allocations, LIHEAP block grants, Community Health Center grants, and dozens of other programs use county or census-tract poverty rates to set funding formulas or eligibility thresholds. A school district where over 40% of students live in poverty qualifies for community-wide Title I "schoolwide" status. Census tracts above 20% poverty for 30+ years are designated "persistent-poverty" areas and qualify for additional federal investment. For local governments, the poverty rate is the single most-watched indicator of community distress; sustained increases trigger reviews of social-service capacity, housing assistance, and emergency-food infrastructure.

How the Census measures it

The figure comes from ACS Table B17001, Poverty Status in the Past 12 Months by Sex by Age. The Census Bureau collects pre-tax cash income from each surveyed family, sums it across all related family members in the household, and compares that sum to the poverty threshold for the family's size and composition. The threshold is adjusted annually for inflation using the CPI-U. The denominator for the rate is people whose poverty status is determined, typically about 98% of the population in a given area.

How to read the numbers

The US poverty rate is around 12-13%. State rates range from roughly 7% in New Hampshire and Utah to nearly 20% in Mississippi and Louisiana. County and city rates vary far more widely, small isolated towns in Appalachia, the Deep South, and on tribal lands can exceed 40%, while wealthy suburbs report rates under 3%. Within a single metro area, the city-suburb gap is often 10-15 percentage points. Two patterns to watch for: a poverty rate that is very high in a small place (under 5,000 residents) may reflect a single concentrated institution (a college, a shelter, a reservation boundary) rather than community-wide hardship; and a poverty rate that has dropped sharply over a decade in a rapidly-growing area is usually the result of displacement rather than rising incomes among the original residents.

Caveats and limitations

The poverty thresholds were last fundamentally re-designed in the 1960s and have only been adjusted for inflation since. They do not account for geographic cost-of-living differences, the same income that puts a family below the line in rural Mississippi keeps them above the line in San Francisco, where actual deprivation is far worse. The threshold also excludes major modern anti-poverty programs (the Earned Income Tax Credit, SNAP, housing vouchers) from the income definition, so the official rate overstates poverty by roughly 2-4 percentage points compared to a complete accounting. Use the official rate for legal/funding purposes and as a rough comparator across places; use the Supplemental Poverty Measure if available when comparing the experience of poverty across regions.