Last week, the United States Census Bureau released “Poverty in the United States: 2024,” its most recent annual report on poverty in America. In this report, analysts at the United States Census Bureau comb through their data from the previous year to provide insights on poverty in the United States.
One of the most valuable things the report gives us is a breakdown of who is in poverty in the United States using different demographic groups as baselines. When I am looking at this data, I gravitate toward using the Supplemental Poverty Measure rather than the Official Poverty Measure because it is based on a methodology for poverty that is more updated for 2025.
So who is poor in America?
12.9% of All People
According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, 12.9% of Americans are under the poverty threshold for their household, meaning more than one in eight Americans are in poverty. This number is identical to the percentage of people in poverty in the 2023 report, but is up from the low point of 2021, when the poverty rate in the United States dipped below 8% due to expansion of the federal child tax credit. The current poverty rate is the highest rate the United States has seen since 2017.
Women
A total of 13.6% of women in the United States are in poverty, compared to 12.3% of men. Women tend to have lower incomes and larger households than men, which means they tend to have less resources to provide for households with more needs. This leads to a small gender gap in poverty rates in the United States.
Retirement-Age People
Among people age 65 or older, 15% of people have incomes below their household poverty line, compared to only 12.2% of working-age people. This is even higher than the child poverty rate of 13.4%. Retirement-age people tend to have lower incomes than working-age people due to their more limited capacity to work. They also have higher medical expenses which drive up their household needs compared to working-age households. Retirement-age people were one of two categories of people in this poverty report where poverty rates increased from 2023: the retirement age poverty rate increased by 0.8% from 2023 to 2024.
Renters
The gap in poverty rates between renters and homeowners is one of the most drastic we see in this report: the average renter is nearly four times as likely to be in poverty (23.3% poverty rate) as the average homeowner with a mortgage (6.1% poverty rate). An interesting wrinkle to this statistic is that homeowners without mortgages had poverty rates nearly double the poverty rate for homeowners with a mortgage. This suggests that the causality probably flows the other direction: people who are in poverty choose to rent, not that renting is making people poor. Often people mistake homeownership as a cause of pulling people out of poverty. The data suggests that no, homeownership is not a ticket out of poverty–it is just something that people who are not in poverty tend to take part in.
Nonwhite People
Black (20.7% poverty rate), Hispanic (20.3% poverty rate), American Indian (19.8% poverty rate), multiracial (13.5% poverty rate), and Asian (12.1% poverty rate) Americans all have higher poverty rates than White Non-Hispanic Americans (8.7% poverty rate). Black Americans were the other category of people who actually saw their poverty rate increase in 2024, going up a full 2.2 percentage points from 2023 to 2024. Each of these categories of people are hurt by limited access to education, employment, and intergenerational wealth and other resources that help people avoid and escape poverty.
People without a High School Diploma
People without a high school education (30.3% poverty rate) are five times more likely to be in poverty than people with bachelor’s degrees or higher (6.1% poverty rate). Even getting a high school diploma cuts the poverty rate in half (16.4% poverty rate). There is a lot of debate about what education means for people: is it about building human capital, making connections, or signaling your underlying value to employers? Whatever it is, in the United States, one of the best ways to know the likelihood someone is in poverty is to know what their education level is.
People without Jobs
Someone who was unemployed in 2024 was more than seven times more likely to be in poverty as someone who worked full-time, year-round in the United States. Even part-time, year-round workers were more than three times as likely to be in poverty as full-time, year-round workers. Having a job makes it a lot easier to have income, which leads to more resources and lower poverty rates.
So what can we take away from these results? It is easy to look at a statistic like “people without a high school diploma are five times as likely to be in poverty as those with a college degree” or “renters are four times as likely to be in poverty as homeowners with a mortgage” and conclude that education and homeownership are cures for poverty. The reality is that federal mortgage deductions have been a costly windfall to high-income households that has done little to budge homeownership and expansion of education has only exacerbated education disparities.
The single policy that has had the largest impact on poverty in the United States any year since the Census Bureau began to calculate the Supplemental Poverty Measure is the 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit. The expansion of a suite of income supports like unemployment insurance and the tax transfers of the 2020 pandemic dropped poverty from 12% to 8.5%, then the expansion of the child tax credit dropped it further to below 8%. The impact of the child tax credit was seen even more strongly in 2022 when it disappeared and poverty shot back over 12% again.
This should not be surprising: the child tax credit puts cash in the pockets of households, directly attacking the problem of poverty. Poverty is most directly a function of two things: availability of income and household needs. While public policy can’t do much about household needs, it has a lot of ability to impact income, which is the low-hanging fruit of U.S. poverty policy.