Historical Supplemental Poverty Measure Data

With funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation and The JPB Foundation (now the Freedom Together Foundation), the Center on Policy and Social Policy created a historical version of the US Census Bureau Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The SPM improves upon official poverty statistics by taking a fuller accounting of the resources that families have at their disposal and is a useful tool for analyzing the effects of social policies on the lives of low-income families. The historical SPM dataset makes SPM poverty rates available back to 1967, the first year the official poverty measure began, to enable tracking of poverty trends and the impact of policy changes over time.