What are poverty rates among working adults? Official data by work experience
The Census Bureau reports poverty rates by work experience for people ages 18 to 64. In 2024, the overall poverty rate for people ages 18 to 64 was 9.6% (lower than the rate of 10.6% for all persons).
The poverty rates by work experience for that age group ranged from 1.8% to 28.2%.
In 2014, about 1.3 million U.S. workers age 16 and over earned
exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Another 1.7 million had wages below the federal
minimum. Together these workers make up 4 percent of all
hourly paid workers.
The “working poor” are people who spend 27 weeks or more in a
year in the labor force either working or looking for work but
whose incomes fall below the poverty
level. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
6.4 million people who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force
were poor in 2022 (the most recent year in which such figures
were published). The working-poor rate—the proportion of the
working poor among all people in the labor force for at least 27
weeks—was 4.0 percent in 2022.
Some policy analysts, policymakers and scholars argue that
low-wage workers should “work their way out of poverty” by
acquiring the human capital that would enable them to leave
poverty-level jobs.
