The U.S. poverty rate fell to the lowest level on record in 2025 while median household income climbed to a record high, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.
The official poverty rate dropped 0.5 percentage points to 10.2% last year, leaving 34.5 million people in poverty, according to data released by the bureau. The decline was the second consecutive annual drop and the lowest rate since the agency began tracking the measure, while median household income rose 2.6% to $87,460, the highest on record dating back to 1967.
The White House hailed the figures, which cover the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.
“President Trump’s proven economic agenda delivered historic working-class prosperity in his first year back in office, with record-high real income and record-low poverty—breaking the records he set during his first term,” the administration said in a statement.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent celebrated the report as he testified before a House committee, calling the data “several inconvenient facts” for the administration’s political opponents.
“Real wages are outpacing inflation,” Bessent said, according to his testimony before the House Financial Services Committee. “The bottom 25 percent of wage earners are seeing larger wage increases than those at the top.”
The official poverty rate for children fell to a historic low of 13.4%, the bureau said, and the rate for Hispanic Americans dropped to a record low of 13.9%. Median income rose 4.8% for black households and 3.0% for white households between 2024 and 2025, while income for Asian and Hispanic households showed no significant change.
The supplemental measure of poverty stayed at 13.1%. That gauge takes non-cash government benefits and taxes into account. Meanwhile, 26.7 million people, or 7.9% of the population, lacked health coverage at some point in 2025, the bureau said. The rate was little changed year over year and sat near historic lows.
Some Democrats argued the report predates the impact of Republican spending reductions. Sharon Parrott, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, claimed cuts to safety-net programs would erase the gains.
“These cuts are already taking food assistance and health care away from millions of people who need it, driving up poverty and hardship,” Parrott said.
The data covers 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term, and does not reflect the Medicaid and food-stamp reductions in the One Big Beautiful Bill, which Trump signed into law in July 2025.
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