Who Was Poor in the United States in 2017?

For the past few years, The Hamilton Project has released an annual report characterizing poverty in America. Describing who is poor is critical for making anti-poverty policy and directly relevant to determining eligibility for means-tested programs.

In 2017, 12.3 percent of the population—39.7 million people—lived in poverty, as defined by the official poverty measure [1]. The share of the population living in poverty was statistically significantly lower in 2017 than in 2016 by 0.4 percentage points.