U.S. Poverty Rate

The poverty line is an income threshold set by the federal government, adjusted for family size and updated for inflation. This chart tracks the share of people living in households below it.

The rate held near 15 percent through the aftermath of the Great Recession, fell steadily from 2014 as the labor market recovered, reached 10.5 percent in 2019, and turned back up in 2020. The repeated years on the axis mark points where the Census Bureau changed how it collects or processes the data, so the two values for the same year are not directly comparable with each other. The slider reads any year; the series is read from the book's own figure.