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# U.S. Census Updates on Poverty and Healthcare for 2025
- URL: https://www.ourcivicdata.com/u-s-census-updates-on-poverty-and-healthcare-for-2025/
- Published: 2026-10-06T15:00:57.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T15:00:58.000Z
- Description: New Census data show poverty holding steady while health coverage shifts quietly from Medicaid to Medicare, and children's uninsured rates climb in all but one region.
- Author: Alexandar McCulloch
- Tags: United States, Economics

The U.S. Census recently updated its poverty and healthcare data to reflect 2025 and the first half of 2026\. The new figures show a mixed picture: poverty rates held roughly steady while the racial gap in official measures continued to narrow, and health insurance coverage saw only marginal overall change, as public coverage, driven by Medicare, increased and Medicaid declined for a second consecutive year.

# How is Poverty Measured?

The U.S. Census uses two definitions of poverty: the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). OPM only accounts for pre-tax income and compares it to a standardized threshold. The poverty threshold is defined as three times the cost of the minimum food diet, adjusted for household size, age, and composition. 

SPM includes both cash and noncash benefits and subtracts necessary expenses (such as taxes and medical expenses). This measurement considers a person's broader context, including not only household size and composition, but also location. While the OPM measures poverty level by the cost of food, SPM is based on recent expenditures on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, telephone, and internet (FCSUti).

Because SPM is a more comprehensive measure of poverty, the SPM poverty rate is typically higher than the OPM rate. Therefore, this article uses the SPM definition to discuss U.S. poverty.

# Current Poverty Rate

The current poverty rate, according to SPM and OPM measures, is 13.1% and 10.2%, respectively. Separated by race, according to the OPM, the racial gap in the poverty rate is shrinking. However, when other essential expenses are included, such as housing, taxes, clothing, and more, the poverty rate for Black and Hispanic Americans consistently remains higher than the White poverty rate. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/3f/0d3fdaf8-2127-46b6-a597-11fe18718a02/content/images/2026/09/SPM-2009-2025-2.png)

One proposition to close this gap is for states and/or the federal government to introduce baby bonds. These are publicly funded trust accounts in which the government deposits seed money at birth. The funds are then invested and grow through compound interest. As of September 2026, four states and Washington, D.C., have passed baby bonds programs, while several others have proposed them.

The United Kingdom was an early adopter of such a program. Its [Child Trust Fund](https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmpubacc/1231/report.html?ref=ourcivicdata.com), launched in 2005 and backdated to cover children born from September 2002, deposited £250 per child, or £500 for lower-income families, with the government paying roughly £2 billion into about 6.3 million accounts before closing to new entrants in 2011\. The program was universal rather than targeted to low-income households, unlike most U.S. state proposals, which generally limit eligibility to children covered by Medicaid or other income-based programs. The UK scheme was eventually wound down over cost concerns and replaced by Junior ISAs, but the accounts that were already opened continued to mature, with around 800,000 account holders a year gaining access to their funds through 2029.

# Social Security Remains the Largest Anti-Poverty Program

Social Security is the most successful program in lifting Americans out of poverty. Nearly 29 million more Americans would be at or below the poverty line without receiving some type of Social Security benefit. Although seniors make up the majority of Social Security recipients, the program is also credited with improving the financial status of Americans under 65, including 1.3 million children. 

Children feel the effects of this program when their family is receiving benefits due to the death of a working parent, a parent becomes disabled, or when extended family like grandparents share household income. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/3f/0d3fdaf8-2127-46b6-a597-11fe18718a02/content/images/2026/09/Social-Security-Nested-Circle-6.png)

This number is [lower than it was ten years ago](https://www.cbpp.org/blog/social-security-lifts-17-million-children-out-of-poverty?ref=ourcivicdata.com), when Social Security lifted 1.7 million children out of poverty. The overall child poverty rate fell from 19.7% in 2015 to a historic low of 13.4%. Although Social Security lifted fewer minors out of poverty in 2025, a smaller share of children required such assistance. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/3f/0d3fdaf8-2127-46b6-a597-11fe18718a02/content/images/2026/10/Program-Effects-4.png)

Refundable tax credits are a distant second, lifting 6.1 million people out of poverty. The Earned Income Tax Credit accounts for most of that effect on its own — 4 million people — with the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit making up the remainder.

Unlike Social Security, which is a direct cash transfer, the EITC's effect compounds over time in ways the SPM snapshot can't fully capture. Research following EITC-recipient families for decades has found that children exposed to larger credits in childhood [go on to complete high school and college at higher rates](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/697477?ref=ourcivicdata.com), and earn more as adults. Researchers have linked childhood EITC exposure to improved adult health outcomes as well, with effects concentrated among children raised in single-parent households and by less-educated parents — the families the SPM shows the credit reaching hardest today. 

The next tier of programs each lifted between 2 and 3.2 million people out of poverty: SNAP (3.1 million), a combined group of smaller noncash benefits including WIC, school lunch, and energy assistance (1.6 million), Housing subsidies (2.1 million), and Supplemental Security Income (2.2 million). A group of smaller cash programs — workers' compensation, TANF, and child support received — lifted a further 2 million people out of poverty, while Unemployment Insurance had the smallest measurable effect of any program in this group, at 300,000 people. That's partly a reflection of timing: unemployment insurance is built to respond to recessions, and its anti-poverty effect tends to spike during downturns rather than stay constant — a very different profile from Social Security or SNAP, which support largely the same population year over year regardless of the broader economy.

Not every factor in the SPM calculation works in the opposite direction. Child support paid, federal income taxes, work expenses, FICA payroll taxes, and medical out-of-pocket expenses are all subtracted from a household's resources under this measure, which means they push people into poverty rather than lift them out of it. Medical expenses have the largest effect in this group, pushing 7.7 million people into poverty — a reminder that the official poverty measure, unlike the SPM, doesn't account for out-of-pocket health costs at all, which is part of why the SPM was developed in the first place. FICA taxes follow at 4.5 million, and work-related expenses like childcare and transportation at 4 million — both a function of the SPM's design choice to measure resources net of the costs of actually holding a job. Federal income taxes had a comparatively modest effect on net poverty, at 1.3 million, since refundable credits like the EITC are also run through the tax system and offset much of what households owe.

# Healthcare Coverage

Overall, the healthcare coverage in the United States remains steady. The total insured rate increased by only 0.1%. Some of these changes include an increase in medicare participation while medicaid usage decreased for the second straight year. This is attributed to changes in policy and enrollment processes. 

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which required states to provide continuous coverage for those enrolled in Medicaid as a condition of receiving increased federal funding for the Medicaid program. The American Rescue Plan Act further extended the continuous coverage mandate for the duration of the pandemic. Moreover, Americans enjoy more or less coverage depending on their demographics. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/3f/0d3fdaf8-2127-46b6-a597-11fe18718a02/content/images/2026/10/Coverage-Type.png)

The uninsured rate of those under the age of 19 is dependent on region. In 2025, approximately 8% of Americans under the age of 19 in the South were uninsured. That is 2.5 points higher than the West (5.5%), 3.5 points higher than the Midwest (4.5%), and 5.4 points higher than the Northeast (2.6%). 

Although a higher share of minors in each region is insured compared to 2013, the uninsured rate for this demographic has been on the rise. The uninsured rate for minors in the South has been rising since 2016\. This rate has increased steadily in the Northeast between 2019 and 2024, before dropping in 2025\. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/3f/0d3fdaf8-2127-46b6-a597-11fe18718a02/content/images/2026/09/Kids-Uninsured-2013-2025-2.png)

This trend makes sense, as the South overall has the lowest insured rate in the country (89.4%) while the Northeast has the highest (95.9%). This pattern lines up with the timeline of the Medicaid unwinding. When the continuous coverage mandate ended in April 2023, states resumed checking eligibility for the first time since the pandemic began, and nationally more than [5.13 million children lost Medicaid or CHIP coverage](https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2024/06/millions-of-children-lose-medicaid-coverage-as-state-enrollment-problems-persist/?ref=ourcivicdata.com) in the process. Nearly 70% of people who lost coverage did so for "procedural" reasons, such as incomplete paperwork, rather than because they were actually found ineligible, and report authors have noted it is likely that many disenrolled children, in particular, remained eligible the whole time. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/0d/3f/0d3fdaf8-2127-46b6-a597-11fe18718a02/content/images/2026/09/Insured-Map.png)

States with large rural populations and states that moved quickly through redeterminations saw the steepest declines: [Texas alone](https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2024/05/14/which-states-were-furthest-along-in-medicaid-unwinding-in-2023/?ref=ourcivicdata.com) lost more than a million children from Medicaid and CHIP rolls, and Florida lost 589,000\. [Eight states](https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2024/06/millions-of-children-lose-medicaid-coverage-as-state-enrollment-problems-persist/?ref=ourcivicdata.com) — Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Utah — ended up with fewer children enrolled than before the pandemic. The unwinding doesn't fully explain the South's wider gap, since some of the hardest-hit states for child disenrollment sit outside that region. Still, the timing is consistent with the South's rising uninsured rate for minors. The region's comparatively low rate of Medicaid expansion likely compounds the effect for children who lose coverage and have fewer alternatives to fall back on.