As of last month, the U.S. poverty rate has been on an upward trajectory.
Between February and March, the rate of poverty in the U.S. increased by 0.5 percentage points to 11.7%, resulting in the highest level since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, though the change wasn’t statistically significant. That’s second only to 11.6% recorded in November 2020. These estimates were taken before the rollout of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan.
Since spring of 2020, real-time poverty data in the U.S. has been tracked every month by economists Bruce Meyer, from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and James Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Economics and the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities.