September 9, 2024
Statement: New 2024 Census CPS Data Shows Increasing Incomes, Steady Health Insurance Rate, and Fairly Constant Poverty Rates
The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis (TCI), released the following statement regarding the new 2024 census CPS data:
The United States Census Bureau released new data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), which provides key indicators of how people across the United States are faring, including income, health coverage, and poverty rates. There remains a lot of work to do to bring child poverty back down to the historically low rate achieved in 2021 thanks to the enhanced Child Tax Credit provision of the American Rescue Plan Act. Congress failed to continue the enhanced credit in recent years. Uninsured rates continue to be at a steady historic low thanks to a key provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that lowers the cost of health care premiums. Lastly, household incomes are rising thanks to an improving economy.
As a reminder, CPS offers insight at the national level, while the upcoming Thursday release of American Community Survey (ACS) data provides a more accurate picture at the state and local levels.
Key Takeaways
Uninsured rates held steady near the historic low of 2022 thanks in part to a key provision in the Inflation Reduction Act that extended enhanced premium tax credits through 2025 and federal protections that helped people maintain Medicaid coverage for the first quarter of 2023. Additionally:
- The national uninsured rate slightly increased from 7.9% in 2022 to 8.0% in 2023, but this increase is not considered statistically significant.
- The percentage of people covered through insurance purchased on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace, increased from 3.6% in 2022 to 4% in 2023, a statistically significant increase.
- Notably, the national uninsured rate for children under 19 increased from 5.4 in 2022 to 5.8% in 2023, a statistically significant change.
- Latino children had the highest uninsured rate at 9.4%, followed by Black children (4.8%), white children (4.4%), and Asian children (4.2%).
- The CPS asks survey respondents, “Were you insured at any point last year?” This means that anyone who became uninsured during 2023 due to the expiration of federal Medicaid protections, which ended April 2023, are not captured.
Household incomes are rising in the United States. An improving economy is helping workers earn more, with both men and women who work full-time, year-round seeing rising earnings:
- Household incomes were 4% higher in 2023 than the prior year after adjusting for the effects of inflation. The typical household in the United States had an income of $80,610 in 2023, with the strongest growth (6.7%) for typical households in the lowest 20% of households in terms of household income.
- Household income change was only statistically significant for white households when disaggregated by race/ethnicity, growing 5.4% to $84,630 in 2023. Non-Hispanic white households, a subset of all white households, saw 5.7% growth to $89,050 in 2023.
- The share of total household income going to everyone below the very top grew in 2023 as the top 5% of households saw a significant decrease in their share of total household income.
- Households who live outside a metropolitan area also had very strong income growth, rising 7.5% in 2023 compared to the prior year.
- Earnings, which is how much someone is paid and therefore incorporates both hourly wages and number of hours worked, rose for both men and women who worked full-time, year-round in 2023. However, earnings grew faster for men than for women.
Poverty in the United States decreased slightly according to the official poverty measure and increased slightly according to the broader supplemental measure. Much work remains to return to the historically low child poverty rates in 2021 thanks to the enhanced federal Child Tax Credit, which was a key contributor to cutting child poverty nearly in half (as measured by the broader supplemental measure). Additionally:
- The official poverty measure (OPM) uses cash income before taxes to calculate poverty rates compared to the official poverty threshold. OPM rates fell from 11.5% in 2022 to 11.1% in 2023. The number of people in poverty did not change significantly from 2022.
- The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) considers other factors in addition to cash income, like taxes and tax credits, noncash benefits, medical and work expenses, geographic differences, and home ownership when calculating poverty. The SPM rate increased by 0.5 percentage points to 12.9% in 2023.
- The increase in the SPM rate is influenced by changing poverty thresholds, which increased more than usual for renters, who make up a majority of the people in poverty. The Census Bureau uses the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) to adjust the threshold for the Official Poverty Measure, while for the more complex SPM the Census Bureau uses a threshold based on consumer spending on a specific bundle of goods, which varies across geographies and home ownership status.
- The SPM child poverty rate increased by 1.3 percentage points to 13.7%, 8.5 percentage points more than the historic low of 5.2% in 2021.
- The SPM child poverty rate continued to rise from historic lows in 2021, with increases from 2022 to 2023 seen for Hispanic (19.5% to 22.0%), Black (17.8% to 20.3%), and Asian (9.9% to 14%) children. Child poverty did not change significantly for non-Hispanic white children from 2022 to 2023.
- SPM rates increased significantly from 2022 to 2023 for Asian and Hispanic individuals (11.6% to 13.6% and 19.3% to 20.9%, respectively) as well as those reporting Two or More Races (11.4% to 13.4%).
TCI staff are available to help reporters interpret this data and discuss what we could see for Thursday’s ACS data release, which will provide a more detailed look at Virginia.
