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As pandemic subsidies disappeared, wages kept workers just ahead of inflation, although gaps have widened for some groups.
Sept. 9, 2025, 2:41 p.m. ET
The last year of the Biden administration saw the financial situation of American households get neither much better, nor much worse, leaving them about where they were on the eve of the Covid pandemic.
Data released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday showed that the supplemental poverty rate, which takes into account taxes and various forms of public assistance, was 12.9 percent in 2024, the same as the previous year. The rate for children dropped to 13.4 percent, while the rate for people over age 65 went up.
Median household income advanced slightly, to $83,730, adjusted for inflation. That restores households to about where they were in 2019, after purchasing power sagged over the past few years as wages grew at a healthy pace but prices skyrocketed.
“It’s a surprisingly positive message, I think, that comes through in the income statistics,” said Scott Winship, a senior fellow at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He noted that median incomes across several groups were “at all time highs, which is really surprising if you listen to all the talk about how the economy is failing everyone.”
Despite calm waters on the surface, however, the data showed clear divergences across race, gender and income level.
Perhaps most striking: A deterioration in the economic well-being of Black people. They were the only racial group to see a decline in median earnings, a significant increase in poverty rates, and a decline in health insurance coverage, which remained flat on average.
