2023 Young Adult Poverty Rates in Historical Perspective

Annual poverty rates are an important indicator of economic wellbeing. Placing current poverty rates in historical context is also crucial for understanding how populations are faring over time and how policy decisions have or have not improved economic wellbeing. Further, different choices related to measuring poverty can affect our understanding of poverty and can yield additional insights when interpreting long-term trends.

In recent work, we examined total population poverty trends from 1967 to 2023 in the United States under four different poverty measures, finding that while measurement choices alter the shape of long-term trends, government policies and programs have played a critical and growing role in reducing poverty. However, these findings may not hold true when looking at particular population subgroups, such as young adults. Young adults are a group of particular interest given that they are less likely to qualify for government policies and programs, either because they have not yet had children or do not qualify for support based on their age.

This brief builds on the Center on Poverty and Social Policy’s prior work on long-term historical poverty measurement by focusing specifically on poverty among young adults. We examine poverty rates among young adults from the ages of 18 to 24 and ages 25 to 34, both before and after counting resources from government policies and programs. We present poverty rates for young adults under the four different measures used in our prior work: (1) the historical Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), (2) the anchored 2012 SPM, (3) the anchored 2022 SPM, and (4) a fully relative poverty measure.

Key Findings

• Understanding how well young adults are faring today, relative to the past, depends on the measure used and how it accounts for changes in living standards over time. 
   
• When set against a fixed standard of living, as in the anchored SPM, 18- to 24-year-olds appear better off today than in the 1960s. But under the historical SPM or the relative poverty rate, poverty among 18- to 24-year-olds has remained flat or risen since the 1960s, as these measures reveal young adult incomes have not kept up with changing standards of living. Trends for 25- to 34-year-olds are less divergent across measures.
   
• Across all measures, tax and safety net policies play an increasing role reducing poverty rate over time. However, the anti-poverty effects of policy are larger for 25- to 34-year-olds, compared to 18- to 24-year-olds, who tend to be left out of programs because they are either too young to qualify on their own and often do not yet have children that would qualify them for family-focused policies.

Related work: 2023 Poverty rates in historical perspective

Suggested Citation:

Vinh, Ryan, Christopher Wimer, and Sophie Collyer. 2024. 2023 Young adult poverty rates in historical perspective. Poverty and Social Policy Brief, vol. 9, no. 3.  New York: Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University.

Published on March 21, 2025