Working poor
social class of working people whose incomes fall below a poverty line due to low-income jobs and low familial household income
The working poor are working people whose incomes fall below a given poverty line due to low-income jobs and low familial household income. These are people who spend at least 27 weeks in a year working or looking for employment, but remain under the poverty threshold.
In the United States, the official measurement of the working poor is controversial. Many social scientists argue that the official measurements used do not provide a comprehensive overview of the number of working poor. One recent study proposed over 100 ways to measure this and came up with a figure that ranged between 2% and 19% of the total United States population.
Measurement
Absolute
According to the US Department of Labor, the working poor "are persons who spent at least 27 weeks [in the past year] in the labor force (that is, working or looking for work), but whose incomes fell below the official poverty level." In other words, if someone spent more than half of the past year in the labor force without earning more than the official poverty threshold, the US Department of Labor would classify them as "working poor". (Note: The official poverty threshold, which is set by the US Census Bureau, varies depending on the size of a family and the age of the family members.) As of 2021, the poverty threshold for a family of four people is $27,479 and for a single person $13,788.
The official poverty threshold is calculated by using the Consumer Price Index for goods, multiplying the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963 by three, a family's gross income (before tax), and the number of family members. In 2023, 6.1 million people were classified as working poor. Among people who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force, the working-poor rate was 3.8 percent, down from 4.0 percent in 2022.
“Working poor” enters the record as social class of working people whose incomes fall below a poverty line due to low-income jobs and low familial household income. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Working, poor and social can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q649011. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 1963, 2023 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Working poor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.