Building a Colorado Specific Poverty Measure

Although poverty measurement has become more comprehensive, producing a timely and detailed picture of poverty at the state and local levels remains a challenge. Many policy decisions that affect families’ economic well-being are made or implemented by state and local governments, yet the best available information to guide those decisions is often national in scope. State-specific poverty measures can help fill this gap by adapting established national approaches to reflect each state’s data, policy rules, and conditions.

This paper describes the development of the Colorado Poverty Measure, which adapts the national Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) to Colorado’s context to support state and local policy analysis. The measure draws on the larger sample size of the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) and aligns survey estimates with administrative benchmarks to better capture the role of safety net programs in reducing poverty. The resulting data provide a foundation for evaluating existing programs and estimating how proposed policy changes could affect families’ resources and poverty.