All children deserve to live happy, fulfilling lives. This means that all children should have their immediate health and safety needs met, and no child should be denied the chance for a bright future based on their family’s hardship.
We are failing our nation’s children in this regard. In September 2025, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 13.4% of children (just under 10 million) in the United States lived in households with incomes below the poverty threshold in 2024 ($31,812 for a family of four with two children). These numbers are relatively unchanged from the previous year, a disappointing lack of progress for America’s children. The outlook does not seem any brighter next year, as new research from Columbia University finds that the purported “expansion” of the Child Tax Credit in the recently passed H.R. 1 — also known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill” — will not meaningfully reduce child poverty.
This is not a small problem — the number of kids experiencing poverty is greater than the population of 11 individual states. Millions of children lack access to sufficient food, stable housing, clean diapers, and other resources that they need to nurture their developing brains and bodies. The hardships brought by poverty not only have repercussions for the children impacted, but for the nation as a whole.
The country’s recent upward child poverty trend is particularly maddening when you consider that earlier this decade, Congress enacted temporary policies that cut child poverty nearly in half, proving that well-designed, deliberate tax policy can provide the blueprint for a major reduction in child poverty. Congress just enacted major tax legislation once again in 2025, but this time it was intentionally designed to leave out children living in poverty.
Annual Census Data And Trends
Supplemental Poverty Measure
The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) is the most realistic measure of annual poverty, using a household income threshold based on the cost of food, clothing, shelter, utilities, and a small number of other needs, and adjusting this figure for family size and geographic differences in housing costs. The census then considers cash income (including child support), in-kind benefits, taxes paid and credits received, work expenses, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and child support paid to another household. The Supplemental Poverty Measure shows roughly the same number of children living in poverty in 2024 as the year prior.
Using the SPM:
- 3.3% of children (2.4 million) were living in “deep poverty,” defined as having half the poverty threshold income for corresponding family size. This number is roughly double the deep child poverty rate from 2021, when the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit was in effect. These are children in households with very few resources (an annual income of less than $19,000 a year for a family of four with two children) who face severe material deprivation.
- 35.5% of children (25 million) were living in households with annual incomes up to double the poverty threshold — around $74,000 a year for a family of four with two children — but were still struggling with material hardship.
- Using the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator, in many places a family of four with two children needs at least an annual income of $80,000 to cover household expenses.
An Expanded Child Tax Credit Would Slash Poverty
In 2024, the refundable portion of the Child Tax Credit prevented 1.5 million children from experiencing poverty in the United States. This is a significant, but much smaller impact than if the improvements made in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) had still been in place. Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy found that if the American Family Act, which contains many of the same improvements previously enacted under ARPA, had been in place in 2024, an additional 3.3 million children would have been spared from poverty. By comparison, Columbia finds that if H.R. 1 had been in effect it would have had no additional impact on poverty beyond current law – meaning that the Republican “expansion” of the CTC does nothing to address the urgent crisis of child poverty.
Improvements to the Child Tax Credit through ARPA had narrowed the poverty gap between Black and white children as well as between Hispanic and white children by reaching many children of color who were previously left out of receiving some or all of the Child Tax Credit because their families earned too little to be eligible. That gap is now wider, increased by the Child Tax Credit’s return to previous law, which denies the full credit to more than one quarter of all children.
Black and Hispanic children are disproportionately left behind, as well as young children, children in rural communities, and children in larger families.
According to the new census figures, in 2024, Black, Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native children all experienced poverty at a rate about three times that of white children:
- Black children (alone, not Hispanic): 22.7%
- Hispanic children (any race): 21.5%
- American Indian and Alaska Native (alone): 19.8%
- Asian (alone): 9.6%
- White (alone, not Hispanic): 6.7%
Improvements to the Child Tax Credit made in ARPA included a permanent expansion to allow families of all sizes in Puerto Rico to be eligible. (Previously, only families with three or more children were eligible, leaving out 90% of families on the island.)
Poverty Hurts Children and the Country as a Whole
Poverty, even for a short time, can significantly harm children’s development and future success. Poverty means less income in households to buy nutritious food, secure safe shelter, receive proper physical and mental health care, buy clean diapers, education materials, and other items that are critical to a child’s healthy development. Poverty also means increased stress for parents and caretakers, reducing their mental and emotional bandwidth for their children as they struggle to make ends meet.
Poverty is linked to worse physical health outcomes for children, including chronic disease such as asthma. Children living in poverty are at higher risk of experiencing food insecurity, which adversely affects their growth and development. Hunger, inadequate nutrition, poor physical health and the other effects of poverty on children contribute to a lack of school readiness, which brings consequences well into adulthood. For instance, children who experience poverty generally have lower levels of educational attainment and earn less as adults than peers who did not experience poverty. The duration of poverty matters for children as well
— the longer a child experiences poverty, the greater likelihood they will experience poverty as an adult.
Poor families with children are more likely to come into contact with the child welfare system. Reporters of child maltreatment too often conflate poverty with neglect due to misunderstanding or bias, and therefore report neglect when the real issue is poverty and a lack of household resources. The research organization Child Trends reports that nearly half of states do not specifically exempt poverty-induced deprivation from their definitions of child maltreatment, which makes children from poor families in these states more susceptible to being reported, investigated, and substantiated for child neglect.
Poverty doesn’t just have negative implications for individual children, but for society as a whole, costing the U.S. upwards of $1 trillion a year in lost economic output.
Congress Must Act Now on Child Poverty
The good news is, we know how to combat child poverty. A 2019 non-partisan, landmark study from the National Academy of Sciences finds that the negative outcomes associated with child poverty directly result from a lack of income. When families receive cash assistance, it not only reduces child poverty but improves children’s short- and long-term health, and educational and economic outcomes, both by increasing access to resources that support children’s healthy development and reducing household stress. Cash assistance has a two-generation effect in promoting economic mobility: In addition to supporting children, the assistance helps adults in the household afford child care, transportation to work, higher education, or job training programs that lead to steady employment and higher-paying jobs.
The outcomes of the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansions confirm these findings. Numerous surveys found that households with children used the payments to buy food, pay rent, cover child care costs, and provide clothing, educational materials, and activities that enrich children’s lives in the short- and long-term. The expanded Child Tax Credit helped cut child poverty nearly in half, and hunger among families with children (households that reported that they sometimes or often do not have enough to eat) decreased by more than 25%. Families reported that the payments gave them a sense of relief from the constant worry of how to cover bills and keep their household afloat.
In order to make sustainable progress in reducing child poverty, federal policies must:
- Advance Racial Equity: Significant racial and ethnic economic disparities persist, despite the progress of 2021. The poverty gap between Black and Hispanic children and their white peers has widened. Children in immigrant families continue to face higher rates of poverty than children in non-immigrant families due to laws and policies that restrict their access to tax credits and other benefits. Children in Puerto Rico face higher rates of poverty than children in the 50 states and the District of Columbia as a result of their unequal access to federal benefits, part of a long legacy of discrimination against Americans living in the territories.
- Improve Poverty Measurement: Thresholds used to measure poverty remain much too low and therefore underestimate how many children are experiencing material hardship and deprivation. In many areas of the country, families with incomes significantly over the poverty thresholds still struggle to cover household expenses. Even the more accurate SPM does not take all household basic needs into account. Finally, children in Puerto Rico and the other U.S. territories are left out of most federal statistical products, including the reporting of national child poverty rates.
- Build Political Will: Reams of evidence support what works to combat child poverty. But a lack of political will on the part of lawmakers has stymied lasting progress. Establishing a national child poverty reduction target in the United States would provide a tool to increase accountability and focus on child poverty across the federal government. Other countries have proven the effectiveness of poverty reduction targets — the United Kingdom cut its child poverty rate in half between 1999 and 2008 after setting a child poverty reduction target; before the outbreak of COVID-19, Canada had reduced child poverty by more than a third since 2015. In the United States, momentum is growing, with child poverty reduction targets established in California, Puerto Rico, and New York state. Setting a target would help create the momentum needed to pass long-term policies and investments that would ultimately end child poverty across the country.
The enactment of H.R.1 – and with it, the largest cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the nation’s history – will make children already living in poverty even worse off. The law jeopardizes their health care, makes it harder for them to access a rural hospital, leaves them hungrier by cutting off their family’s access to SNAP, and will likely leave them without healthy meals at school. One year from now, child poverty in the United States will likely be much worse.
Congress must reverse the harmful cuts in H.R. 1, and should start by ending the SNAP cost shift to states that is slated to begin next year.