2026 Poverty Guidelines

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Official Poverty Measure
The Census Bureau determines a person’s poverty status by comparing his or her resources against a measure of need. For the official measure, the term resources is defined as total family income before taxes, and the measure of need is a dollar amount called a poverty threshold. Only money income before taxes is used in calculating the official poverty measure, meaning this measure does not treat in-kind benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), housing subsidies, or employer-provided benefits as income. Because the official measure uses income before taxes, it also excludes refundable tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, as well as stimulus payments that were made as refundable tax credits.

Supplemental Poverty Measure
Criticisms of the official poverty measure have led to the development of an alternative research measure called the SPM, which the Census Bureau also computes and releases. The SPM includes adjustments to reflect geographic variations in housing costs, and the estimated effects of taxes and in-kind benefits (such as housing, energy, and food assistance) on poverty, while the official measure does not.

The official measure provides a comparison of the population below poverty over a longer period
than does the SPM, including some years before many current antipoverty assistance programs had been developed.

(Source: Congressional Research Service, Poverty in the United States in 2021.)