Nearly 2 million Georgia Residents Living in Poverty

September 16, 2011 Print This Post

According to new poverty data the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey released this week, Georgia’s poverty rate was the third highest in the nation in 2010.

Georgia’s 18.7-percent poverty rate was exceeded only by Mississippi (22.7 percent) and Louisiana (21.6 percent). The U.S. poverty rate was 15.1 percent. The federal poverty threshold is an income of less than $11,139 for a single person, or $22,314 for a family of four.

Georgia’s poverty rate means 1,836,000 residents lived in poverty in 2010, an increase of 61,000 from the previous year.

Georgia’s median income rose slightly in 2010 to $44,108 from $43,340 in 2009, but it was still the 12^th-lowest state median income in America. The U.S. average median income was $44,445. Beyond that, nearly 2 million residents were without health insurance. At 19.4 percent, that’s the eighth highest in the country, and more than 3 percentage points higher than the national rate of 16.3 percent.

The Current Population Survey is a monthly survey of households conducted by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

We recently updated our county and regional Georgia profiles of child and family well-being where you can find poverty and unemployment data for each county and region in Georgia as well as other key health, education, and economic information.

For more information on the profound impact of the recent recession on the economic well-being of Georgia’s children, read our data brief on this topic.