The Census Bureau reported Tuesday that real median household income stood at $87,460 in 2025, a figure that has not been surpassed in the agency’s records going back to 1967. The official poverty rate dropped to 10.2%, down half a percentage point from the prior year and the lowest in the bureau’s records, with 34.5 million Americans counted as poor.
The poverty rate has now declined for three consecutive years, according to Axios. Child poverty fell to a record low of 13.4%, and the poverty rate among Hispanic Americans dropped to 13.9%, also a record low since the bureau began tracking that figure in 1973.
The Census Bureau said the gains were not evenly distributed. Earnings among the top decile of households climbed 1.7%, while those at the bottom decile saw no measurable improvement, according to Axios. A household at the 90th percentile took in approximately $261,300, while one at the 10th percentile brought in around $20,010. The highest-earning quintile claimed more than half of total household income at 52.4%, leaving the lowest-earning quintile with just 3%.
A broader measure of economic hardship told a different story. The Supplemental Poverty Measure — which factors in taxes, government benefits, housing costs, and medical expenses — came in at 13.1%, essentially unchanged from the prior year and running almost 3 percentage points higher than the official rate, according to Axios. Out-of-pocket medical costs were responsible for pulling roughly 7.7 million people beneath the supplemental poverty threshold, the Census Bureau said.
Turning to health insurance, the Census Bureau counted 26.7 million people — 7.9% of the population — as uninsured throughout all of 2025, a number that was statistically unchanged year over year. Nationally, the share of the population enrolled in Medicaid slipped to 17.1%, a decline equivalent to about 1.4 million people losing that coverage compared with 2024, according to Axios.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent welcomed the data while testifying before a House committee on Tuesday, according to CNBC. The 2025 figures largely predate major safety-net reductions enacted through legislation passed in the summer of 2025, and the data do not reflect economic shifts that have occurred since, according to CNBC.
The findings come from three Census Bureau reports covering income, poverty, and health insurance coverage in the United States, based on data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.