2023 Older adults’ 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 taxes and transfers have played a critical and growing role in reducing poverty.

This brief builds on the Center on Poverty and Social Policy’s prior work examining long-term historical poverty trends under various measures by focusing specifically on poverty among older adults. We examine poverty rates among older adults who are aged 65 years or older, both before and after counting resources from government policies and programs. We present poverty rates for older 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

• Older adults are significantly better off today than in the 1960s across all poverty measures. This improvement is evident when assessed against a fixed standard of living (as in the anchored SPM), and when considering measures that adjust for changing living standards (as in the historical SPM and relative poverty rate). 
   
• Before accounting for government taxes and transfers, older adult poverty has declined from 1967 to 2023 across all measures, and these declines are even larger when accounting for the role of these taxes and transfers in reducing poverty.
   
• From 1967 to 2023, the role of government taxes and transfers in reducing poverty rates has increased substantially, demonstrating the critical role such policies have played—and continue to play—in reducing poverty rates for older adults.  

Suggested Citation:

Vinh, Ryan, Christopher Wimer, Sophie Collyer, and Sofia Georgianni. 2025. 2023 Older adults’ poverty rates in historical perspective. Poverty and Social Policy Brief, vol. 9, no. 9.  New York: Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University. 

Published on June 12, 2025