Social Security payments kept 28.8 million people above the poverty line in the United States during 2025, according to new data released by the Census Office.
The result makes Social Security the country’s most impactful poverty-fighting program, far above SNAP, reimbursable tax credits, SSI and housing subsidies.
The data is part of the report “Poverty in the United States: 2025”, published on September 15, 2026 from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.
The calculation requires an explanation. The Census Bureau uses the so-called Supplementary Measure of Poverty (SPM) to analyze how different benefits, taxes and expenses modify household resources available.
The methodology allows you to calculate what would happen to poverty if a given source of income was eliminated individually.
In the case of Social Security, the outcome of 2025 was strong: by including those benefits, 28.8 million people are no longer classified as poor under the SPM.
That’s why the figure doesn’t necessarily mean that 28.8 million Americans were poor before receiving a check and later out of that situation. It is an estimate of the effect that these incomes have on the calculation of poverty.
The graph published by the Census Bureau allows you to compare the effect of different programs.
In 2025, these were some of the ones that kept the most people out of extra poverty:
The difference is huge: the effect attributed to Social Security is more than nine times higher than that of SNAP in this measurement.
However, the Census warns that these calculations are not mutually exclusive, so they should not be added to estimate a total of beneficiaries.
The same analysis also shows what spending reduces the available resources of households and, as a result, increases the number of people classified as poor under the SPM.
Pocket-paid medical expenses had the biggest negative effect, pushing about 7.7 million people below the additional poverty threshold.
They also had an impact:
This is precisely one of the reasons why SPM can offer a different picture of the official poverty measure.
According to the official measurement, 34.5 million people lived in poverty by 2025, equivalent to 10.2% of the population.
The rate fell 0.5 percentage points compared to the previous year.
The official child poverty rate also fell to 13.4%, the lowest level ever recorded, while the corresponding to the Spanish population fell to a historic minimum of 13.9%.
However, under the Supplementary Poverty Measure, the rate was 13.1% in 2025, a level that statistically showed no significant changes compared to 2024.
The official poverty measure compares a family’s pre-tax monetary income to a national threshold determined by the composition of the household.
The SPM is wider. In addition to certain incomes, it incorporates assistance programs that the traditional measure does not include and costs such as taxes, work-related costs and pocket medical expenses.
It also considers geographical differences in housing costs. For that reason, it allows you to measure specifically how much programs such as Social Security, SNAP, SSI or tax credits alter the economic level of households.
Social Security had already been the program with the greatest effect against poverty by 2024.
In that year, the Census Bureau estimated that 28.7 million people remained out of additional poverty thanks to these benefits.
More than a substantial change from year to year, the data shows the structural importance these payments have on the incomes of millions of U.S. households.
And the impact is especially visible among older adults, although Social Security benefits also reach other groups through disability and survival payments.
