Overall poverty rates for children, working-age adults and pensioners

The long-term data shows clear differences in how poverty affects different groups. Children have consistently faced the highest poverty rates of any age group, and this gap has widened again in recent years. After falling in the early 2000s, child poverty rose from the early 2010s onwards, dipped briefly during the pandemic, and has since climbed to its highest level in over a decade (31% in 2023/24).

Overall poverty has remained between 20% and 22% since 2004/05 and stands at 21% in the latest year.

Poverty among working-age adults with children has stayed above the overall rate throughout the period and is now 25%. By contrast, poverty rates for working-age adults without children and for pensioners have been much lower for the last two decades. Pensioner poverty fell sharply from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and has remained relatively low since, now at 16%. Poverty among working-age adults without children has also been broadly stable in recent years, at around 17%.

Source: Households Below Average Income, 2023/24, DWP
Notes: Figures do not sum, due to rounding each group separately.

More than 1 in 5 people in the UK (21%) are in poverty — 14.2 million people. Of these, 7.9 million are working-age adults, 4.5 million are children and 1.9 million are pensioners.

In 2023/24, almost one third of children in the UK were in poverty (31%). Children in lone-parent families face the greatest risk: over 4 in 10 (43%) live in poverty, compared with 1 in 4 (26%) in couple families. Adults and children in lone-parent families remain the group most likely to experience poverty.

Among pensioners, poverty affects around 1 in 6 (16%). Single pensioners are almost twice as likely to be in poverty as pensioners in couple households.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies provides consistent poverty data back to 1961 (IFS, 2024). This chart compares poverty rates across recent UK governments. The Labour administrations of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan are combined with the Conservative government of Edward Heath to show the longer-term trend before 1979.

Poverty rates ranged between 12% and 17% before 1979. They rose sharply under Margaret Thatcher, reaching around one in four in poverty by the mid-1990s. Rates fell in the early years of the Tony Blair government but levelled off around 2004/05. Since then, the headline rate has remained broadly static. We will have official data on poverty levels since the July 2024 election, for 2024/25, in March 2026.