HISTORICAL POVERTY TRENDS & MEASUREMENT
Assessing progress in the fight against poverty requires consistent and accurate measurement. The Center’s historical poverty work harnesses multiple data sources to document trends in poverty and the changing role of social policy over time.
Under the Census Bureau’s official poverty measure, poverty in the United States appears to have stagnated in recent decades. But the official poverty measure has a number of limitations: it does not capture the effect of near-cash transfers (e.g. food or housing assistance), taxes (e.g. refundable tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit or Child Tax Credit), necessary expenses (out-of-pocket medical costs, child care, commuting, and more), or regional differences in cost of living. Since 2009, the US Census Bureau has released a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) alongside the official measure to better captures the impact of taxes and transfers and social policy changes. With funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and The JPB Foundation, we created a unique historical data set that extends the SPM back to 1967, the year in which the official poverty measure began. Our historical SPM data analysis reveals how public programs have reduced poverty over time and the increasing importance of anti-poverty policy in recent years. With this data, we are able to track long-term trends in deep poverty; urban versus rural poverty; the impacts of anti-poverty policy on poverty rates among children, young adults, working age adults, and seniors; differential impacts of policy and poverty by race and ethnicity; how policy decisions can protect households during economic downturns; and more.
Our historical Supplemental Poverty Measure data is available for public-use. The historical analysis helps to account for the impacts of anti-poverty policy over time. The data set extends back to 1967, like the official poverty measure.
Featured News
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In the war on poverty, a dogged adversary
Eduardo Porter, The New York Times
Without the panoply of government benefits — like food stamps, subsidized school lunches and the earned-income tax credit, which provides extra money to household heads earning low wages — the nation’s poverty rate last year would have reached almost 31 percent, up from 25 percent in 1967, according to research.
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Has America become less poor?
Vauhini Vara, The New Yorker
A new study by a group of Columbia University researchers suggests what some policymakers have suspected for years: if you account for a fuller range of costs like clothing and shelter, and for government aid like food stamps, poverty has declined over the years—and by a lot.
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U.S. poverty rate decreased over past half-century thanks to safety-net programs
Zachary A. Goldfarb, The Washington Post
According to new research, the safety net helped reduce the percentage of Americans in poverty from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012, contradicting the official poverty rate which suggests there has been no decline in the percentage of Americans experiencing poverty since the 1960s.
Fact Sheets and Data
Long-Term Trends in Poverty by State
We used our historical Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) data to estimate state-level trends in poverty from 1976 to the present. Access data on the long-term poverty trends in your state.
National SPM Poverty Rates, 1967 to 2020
This data table enables a quick-view of the poverty rates in any given year for the US population, children, working-age adults, and the elderly. It includes the historical SPM poverty rates and SPM poverty rates anchored to 2012 SPM thresholds, with and without taxes and transfers.
