U.S. Poverty Fell To A Record Low In 2025. A Broader Measure Came In Higher, New Figures Show.

The U.S. poverty rate fell to 10.2% in 2025, the lowest in the Census Bureau's historical series, while median household income rose to a record high as the number of Americans living below the official poverty line declined for a second straight year.

About 34.5 million people were in poverty last year, down from 35.9 million in 2024, when the poverty rate stood at 10.6%, Census Bureau data showed Tuesday. The 0.5 percentage-point decline brought the official rate to its lowest level since the government's historical poverty series began.

Real median household income increased 2.6% to $87,460 in 2025, the highest level in a Census series dating back to 1967. The increase followed a year in which median household income showed no statistically significant change.

The official poverty measure determines whether a person or family falls below the poverty line by comparing pretax cash income with a threshold that varies according to family size and composition. For a family with two adults and two children, the poverty threshold was $32,649 in 2025.

Under the Census Bureau's official methodology, noncash government benefits such as food assistance and housing subsidies are not counted as income, while tax credits are also excluded. The thresholds are the same across the country and are adjusted annually for inflation.

Children recorded another decline in poverty last year. The official poverty rate for people under 18 fell to 13.4%, its lowest level in the Census Bureau's historical data.

The picture was different under the government's broader Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM, which put the poverty rate at 13.1% in 2025.

Unlike the official measure, the SPM accounts for resources including tax credits and noncash government assistance for food, housing and utilities. It also subtracts taxes and necessary expenses including medical costs, child care and work-related spending.

Its poverty thresholds also vary based on housing status and geographic differences in housing costs, making it a broader measure of the resources households have available to meet basic needs.

The SPM rate was 13.0% in 2024 under recently corrected historical estimates, meaning the 2025 reading was little changed even as the official poverty rate declined.

The Census Bureau revised its SPM estimates for 2019 through 2024 ahead of Tuesday's annual report after the Bureau of Labor Statistics discovered errors in the historical poverty thresholds used to calculate the measure.

The corrections lowered previously published national SPM poverty rates by between 0.1 and 0.3 percentage point from 2019 through 2023 and raised the 2024 estimate from 12.9% to 13.0%. The Census Bureau said the revisions did not meaningfully change the overall historical trend.

Health insurance coverage, meanwhile, was largely stable last year. About 26.7 million people, or 7.9% of the population, did not have health insurance at any point during 2025. The change from the previous year was not statistically significant, leaving the uninsured rate near historically low levels.

The Census Bureau considers a person uninsured for the calendar year only if they had no health coverage at any point during that year. Coverage can include private insurance, employment-based plans, Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs.

The income, poverty and health insurance estimates are drawn from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which provides the federal government's official national poverty estimates as well as annual data on household income and health coverage.

The figures show the official poverty rate falling for a second consecutive year while inflation-adjusted household income moved higher. The number of people classified as living in poverty declined by roughly 1.4 million from 2024, with the improvement also extending to the official child poverty rate.

The difference between the official and supplemental measures, however, remained substantial. While 10.2% of Americans were classified as poor using the government's traditional cash-income measure, the broader calculation that incorporates taxes, government benefits and major household expenses put the rate at 13.1%.