Official poverty rate, 2025

The official poverty measure excludes taxes, refundable credits, and noncash benefits, so it is a cleaner near-term read on cash-income and labor-market strength than SPM.

The central path continues the 2023-2024 improvement but slows it. A recession would have shown more clearly in the 2025 labor market by now, so the upper tail is moderate rather than extreme.

Without packs, this run extrapolates the 2021-2024 official poverty trend and checks whether labor-market deterioration is large enough to reverse the decline.

Control trend holds the 2024 rate at 10.6 with a mild downward labor-income adjustment offset by threshold growth.

The interval is wider because the control does not model cash-income composition or ASEC release noise explicitly.

Packed estimate = 10.6 base rate - 0.2pp labor-income improvement - 0.1pp cash-income bridge adjustment = 10.3.

The packs pull the center slightly below the no-pack trend and narrow the high side because the official measure excludes noncash benefit volatility.

The resolver is the Census Bureau official poverty measure for calendar year 2025, reported as the percentage of people in poverty in the first Poverty in the United States: 2025 release/Table A-1 from CPS ASEC. This is not the SPM: taxes, refundable credits, SNAP, housing-cost adjustments, work expenses, medical expenses, and geographic threshold adjustments do not define this official-poverty target.

Reference class/base rate: the last three first-print official poverty rates are 11.5, 11.1, and 10.6 percent. A simple recent average is 11.07 percent, while the latest level is 10.6 percent. The explicit model prior is persistence blended with the recent mean and realized one-year changes, not a richer time-series model, because only a short recent first-print official series was fetched in this fast run.

Level and momentum: 2024 was already low, so further large declines are harder. The cited labor-market evidence points to some upward risk from 10.6, but the update is kept moderate because the draft did not fetch a full cited table for 2025 earnings, inflation, or transfer-income offsets.

Policy mechanism: because the official measure is pretax cash income, many 2025 changes to taxes, credits, SNAP, medical costs, and housing costs matter less directly than they would for the SPM. Cash earnings, Social Security cash income, unemployment, and official poverty-threshold changes are the main channels for this resolver.

Counter-consideration: a downside-to-poverty scenario is that cash earnings and Social Security income keep pretax cash income ahead of thresholds, leaving the rate near 10.5. An upside poverty scenario is that weak hiring, reduced hours, and CPS sampling produce a sharper reversal to 11.7 or more. Outside the interval would likely require either a surprisingly broad cash-income gain below the median or a much worse late-2025 labor shock than the annual averages imply.

Recent mean = (10.6 + 11.1 + 11.5) / 3 = 11.07. Recent year-to-year first-print changes were -0.4 and -0.5 percentage points, and the three-year level range is 0.9 points. Start from the 2024 level of 10.6 and apply a +0.4 point labor-market and mean-reversion update, giving 10.6 + 0.4 = 11.0. The 80 percent interval uses about +/-0.75 points: roughly 0.5 points for recent annual movement plus several tenths for CPS sampling, income-composition, and release uncertainty, rounded to 10.3 to 11.8.

Review disposition: accepted the coherence fix by making the update +0.4 throughout, added an explicit persistence/recent-mean model prior, tied the update mainly to cited labor evidence, weakened uncited wage and inflation claims, and added an uncertainty decomposition for the 80 percent interval.