Trends in persistent poverty
About 2 mins
Key points
- 18% of children, 11% of pensioners and 11% of working-age adults live in households described as being in persistent poverty, which means they have lived in poverty for 3 out of the past 4 years.
- There has been little change to these rates since 2010/11–2013/14.
Persistent poverty is a particularly important issue for our health, because the experience of prolonged periods of poverty has cumulative effects, for example the build-up of chronic stress. Research on child poverty has found that any exposure to poverty in childhood was associated with worse health, but the effects were more severe for children living in persistent poverty.
This chart shows the percentage of people living in persistent poverty between 1994, and 2023–24, for children, working-age adults and pensioners. Persistent poverty is defined as a person living in a household experiencing poverty for three or more of the last four years. For example, a person is counted as being in persistent poverty in 1994 if their household was in poverty for three or more years between 1991 to 1994.
- Persistent poverty for both children and pensioners and, to a lesser extent, working-age adults, decreased over the course of the 1990s and the early 2000s.
- In the period between 2004 and 2008, this trend reversed for children, continued for pensioners and stayed mostly stable for working-age adults.
- Since 2013–14, there has been little change for working-age adults and pensioners, despite the substantial increases in employment for working-age adults over this period (with the exception of the pandemic).
- Since 2017–18, there has been a decrease in persistent poverty for children. The most recent decrease may be due to changes to the population represented by the data in 2023–24.
- The data presented here are weighted estimates from British Household Panel survey or Understanding Society survey, both longitudinal surveys of households in the UK, published by the Department of Work and Pensions.
- The population represented by the Understanding Society survey differs at inclusion waves – waves 6 (2014–15) and 14 (2023–24), when new households are recruited into the survey. These three waves are not fully comparable with the other waves, and observed differences may partly capture changes in study population.
- Persistent poverty is defined as a person living in a household experiencing poverty (a net household income below 60% of the median in that year) for at least 3 of the preceding 4 years.
- Income is defined as monthly net equivalised household income after housing costs. Income is equivalised, which means it is adjusted for household size to reflect economies of scale: for example, a household of four needs more income for the same standard of living as a household of one, but not four times as much. Housing costs are deducted from income, to reflect that people with lower incomes in particular have fewer options for meeting their housing costs, relative to their income.
- Pensioners are defined as individuals above State Pension age at the time of interview; working-age adults are individuals below State Pension age who are over 16, not in further education and not classed as a dependent child.; children are dependents under the age of 16 years or aged 16 to 18 and in school or non-advanced further education, not married, and living with a parent.
- The category ‘pensioner’ is the technical term used in the statistics produced by the Department for Work and Pensions. ‘Pensioner’ is not our preferred wording at the Health Foundation but is accurate to use in this context.
There is a discontinuity in the time series due to a change in the data sources. This prevents direct comparisons between the period before and after 2008.
Source: Department for Work and Pensions, Income Dynamics: 2010 to 2024, UK, 2026; Department for Work and Pensions, Low-Income Dynamics (1991–2008), Great Britain.
