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Census: record median income, record-low child poverty, wages beating inflation

Census: Record Household Income and Record-Low Child Poverty, ‘Several Inconvenient Facts’ for Trump Critics

by
M.A. Rothman

By M.A. RothmanSeptember 17, 2026 · 4 min read
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The Census Bureau’s annual report card on American households came out on September 15, and it did not say what the administration’s critics have been predicting for two years. Real median household income rose 2.6% in 2025 to $87,460, the highest on record in data going back to 1967, and the official poverty rate fell half a point to 10.2%.

Child poverty and Hispanic poverty both hit the lowest levels the bureau has ever recorded. For an economy the left has spent months describing as a machine for grinding down the working class, those are awkward numbers to explain away.

What the Census Bureau actually reported

The figures come from three reports, Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2025, built on the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, the longest-running survey the bureau conducts and the official source of national poverty estimates. At the release briefing, the bureau’s Liana Fox made a point of noting that “all estimates have been reviewed by career staff, and we followed standard procedures with this release.”

Here is what that career staff found:

  • Income: Median household income was $87,460, up from $85,210 in 2024. “Household income was the highest on record dating back to 1967,” the bureau said. Black households saw a 4.8% gain, White households 3.0%.
  • Poverty: The official rate fell from 10.7% to 10.2%, leaving 34.5 million people below the line. It was the second straight annual decline, and news coverage, including FOX 26 Houston, reported it as the lowest official poverty rate on record.
  • Children: The child poverty rate dropped a full percentage point, to 13.4%. In the bureau’s words, it “fell to its lowest point on record.”
  • Hispanic Americans: The official poverty rate for Hispanic individuals fell to 13.9%, “also the lowest on record.”
  • Women’s pay: The female-to-male earnings ratio for full-time, year-round workers rose to 83.9% from 80.6%, the first significant yearly increase since 2016.

The uninsured rate, 7.9% of the population or 26.7 million people for the full year, was not statistically different from 2024. Income inequality measured by the Gini index was also unchanged.

Bessent: “several inconvenient facts”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the numbers straight to Capitol Hill. In testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, he said the data presented “several inconvenient facts” for the administration’s opponents.

“Under President Trump, the private sector has created over 1 million jobs,” Bessent said. “Real wages are outpacing inflation. The bottom 25 percent of wage earners are seeing larger wage increases than those at the top.” He also argued that the Working Families Tax Cuts had delivered the largest share of tax relief to low- and middle-income Americans.

The White House piled on. Spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement to Newsweek, as reported by Charisma News, that “The President was reelected in a landslide victory to turn the page on Joe Biden’s inflation crisis.”

What the critics said

The loudest voice on the other side belongs to Sharon Parrott, president of the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Her statement on the release day conceded the good news in its own second paragraph: “In 2025, poverty showed signs of improvement, incomes rose as wage gains outpaced inflation, and the uninsured rate remained at historic lows.”

Then she pivoted to the future. The 2025 data, she argued, do not yet capture most of the cuts to food stamps and Medicaid in last year’s Republican reconciliation law, and those cuts “are already taking food assistance and health coverage away from millions of people who need it, driving up poverty and hardship.” CBPP points to a drop of roughly 5 million SNAP recipients since July 2025 and to more than 44 million people below the poverty line under its preferred Supplemental Poverty Measure, which was 13.1% in 2025, statistically unchanged from 2024.

Jared Bernstein, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Biden, called the official poverty reduction “good news” while warning that measures counting post-tax and post-transfer income could look worse next year. He also shot down any suggestion that the numbers were rigged: “I’m highly confident they’d blow whistles if the Trump admin was trying to cook the data.”

Read the fine print honestly

Both sides are now arguing about the future, and that is telling. A year ago the prediction was that Trump’s agenda would make Americans poorer in real time. Instead, the government’s own nonpartisan statisticians found record income, record-low child poverty and wages beating inflation, a fact even the most prominent left-wing anti-poverty group put in writing.

The fight over SNAP and Medicaid will be decided in next September’s data, not this one. But the claim that working families were already being crushed in 2025 did not survive contact with the numbers. Paychecks rose. Fewer children lived below the poverty line than at any point the bureau has measured. Hispanic Americans posted their own record low.

That is the record Republicans will carry into the midterms, and it comes stamped by the Census Bureau, not by a campaign.

The left predicted the poor would get crushed, and the government’s own career statisticians just reported record paychecks and record-low child poverty instead.

Sources

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