Editor’s note: this is a quick glimpse at Census Bureau data released today. For a companion piece, please see CHN’s First Look at Poverty, Hardship, and Health Insurance 2023. Please note that we will continue to share additional data, materials, social media tools, non-partisan voter guides and other helpful material with you throughout the week. 

Real median household income increased from 2022 to 2023, poverty increased (but with a caveat), and the number of Americans without health insurance remained unchanged, according to Census Bureau statistics released Tuesday. 

Of prime importance, the survey data showed greater struggles for families when taking into account more accurate assumptions about their income and expenses. The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) counts tax credits, nutrition and housing benefits towards total available income, and factors in families’ expenses more accurately as well.  In part because rent was up* and benefits like the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and food aid declined, the SPM showed about 2 million more poor people and nearly 1 million more poor children in 2023 than in 2022.  A significant contributor was the reduction in the Child Tax Credit.  In 2021, the expanded CTC lifted 5.3 million people out of poverty; by 2023, the CTC raised only 2.3 million above the poverty line.  SNAP food benefits were also reduced, and so the number of people lifted out of poverty through SNAP dropped from 3.67 million in 2022 to 3.4 million in 2023.   

The survey data shows that the gap between poor White, non-Hispanic children and Black and Hispanic children widened from 2022 to 2023.  The percentage of poor White, non-Hispanic children remained unchanged at 7.2 percent, but rose from 17.4 percent to 19.2 percent for Black children and from 19.5 percent to 22 percent for Hispanic children from 2022 to 2023.  We had seen that the expanded Child Tax Credit somewhat narrowed racial gaps; by allowing the expanded CTC to expire, gaps have again widened. 

In a new analysis, the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University estimated that if the expanded CTC had been in place in 2023, it would have moved 818,000 Black children, 1.47 million Latino children, and 838,000 White children out of poverty. 

The health insurance findings should be seen in context: the Affordable Care Act has contributed to a substantial reduction in the number of uninsured people – from 13.3 percent in 2013 (before the ACA was implemented) to 8 percent in 2023.  The findings understate the documented surge in people getting insurance through the ACA’s individual marketplace plans: from 14.5 million in 2022 to 16.4 million in 2023 and up to 21.4 million in 2024. But of great concern, and mostly not reflected in the 2023 findings, historically high numbers of Medicaid beneficiaries have lost coverage as pandemic protections have ended.  Some of those who lost Medicaid have shifted to the ACA marketplace, but many have just become uninsured.  Here too there are important policy implications.  Premium subsidies in the form of Advance Premium Tax Credits have reduced the cost of ACA marketplace coverage and encouraged enrollment; they will expire in 2025 if Congress does not act.  In addition, there could be more federal oversight of state Medicaid enrollment and renewal practices, to prevent terminations from onerous paperwork requirements. 

A major headline emerging from the new data was a 4.0 percent increase in median household income – the first statistically significant increase since the pre-pandemic year of 2019.  There were gains in inflation-adjusted mean household income for the lowest 3 quintiles from 2021 to 2023 (the lowest quintile gained 6.1 percent, for example), while the top 5 percent lost 2.2 percent over the same period. 

Other highlights from today’s release: 

• Social Security continued to be the most important anti-poverty program in 2023, climbing 27.6 million people out of SPM poverty. Other important anti-poverty programs included the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), child tax credits, housing subsidies, unemployment insurance, and other programs. 

• Real median earnings for men who worked full-time, year-round increased by 3 percent, and real median earnings increased 1.5 percent for women who worked full-time, year-round. 

• But for full-time, year-round workers, the female-to-male earnings ratio in 2023 fell to 82.7 percent from 84.0 percent in 2022. This is the first statistically significant annual decrease in the female-to-male earnings ratio since 2003. 

• The uninsured rate for children under age 19 increased by 0.5 percentage points to 5.8 percent between 2022 and 2023. 

*The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out that recent steep increases in rent created what it calls a “temporary peculiarity.” 

SPM thresholds rose 8.6 percent in 2023 for renters, who make up a majority of people in poverty, according to the Labor Department, which updates the SPM thresholds each year based, in part, on changes in the amount typical families with children spend on basic needs, such as food and housing over five earlier years. 

“This 8.6 percent increase is more than twice the inflation rate in 2023 based on the traditional consumer price index, which stood at 4.1 percent,” CBPP writes. “The SPM’s faster-than-inflation adjustment by itself could add as many as 3 million people to the poverty count and 0.9 percentage points to the poverty rate, CBPP analysis of 2022 data suggests, enough to convert a poverty decline to an apparent poverty increase – a misleading result.”