2023 Working Age Adults’ Poverty Rates in Historical Perspective

2023 Working age 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’s prior work examining long-term historical poverty trends under various measures by focusing specifically on poverty among working age adults. We examine poverty rates of working age adults who are between the ages of 18 and 64, both before and after counting resources from government policies and programs. We present poverty rates for working age 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.

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Key Findings

  • Poverty trends among working age adults differ based on how changes in living standards are accounted for over time. When assessed against a fixed standard of living (as in the anchored SPM), working age adults are significantly better off today than in the 1960s. On the other hand, when considering measures that adjust for changing living standards, working age adults are only slightly better off (as in the historical SPM) or even worse off compared to the 1960s (as in the relative measure).
  • Before accounting for government taxes and transfers, poverty among working age adults has declined from 1967 to 2023 when assessed against a fixed standard of living (as in the anchored SPM). However, when considering measures that adjust for changing living standards, pre-tax and transfer poverty rates among working age adults have risen under both the historical SPM and relative measure.
  • Regardless of measure, the role of government policies and programs in reducing the working-age adult poverty rate has grown over time.

Suggested Citation:

Vinh, Ryan, Christopher Wimer, Sophie Collyer, and Sofia Giorgianni. 2025. 2023 Working age adults’ poverty rates in historical perspective. Poverty and Social Policy Brief, vol. 9, no. 8.  New York: Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University. 

Published on June 12, 2025