About this data

Source: DWP, Households Below Average Income (HBAI), financial years ending 1995 to 2025

• Relative poverty means living in a household with an income below 60% of the median (middle) income in that year.
• Households Below Average Income (HBAI) is based on the Family Resources Survey, which asks around 20,000 households a year about their incomes. Income is household income after taxes and benefits, adjusted for household size and composition, and everyone in a household is counted as having the same income.
• Before housing costs (BHC) measures income before rent, mortgage interest, water rates and similar costs are paid. After housing costs (AHC) subtracts them, so it better reflects the money people have left to live on. Pensioners, many of whom own their homes outright, have lower poverty rates after housing costs; families with children have higher ones.
• Figures are for financial years (April to March), shown by the year they end: 2025 is April 2024 to March 2025. Figures up to 2001/02 cover Great Britain; from 2002/03 they cover the UK.
• From 2021/22, DWP uses administrative records for income from benefits instead of what people report in the survey, so figures before and after are not directly comparable. The lines are broken at that point.
• Data for 2020/21 was collected during the pandemic, when the survey's sample was smaller and differently made up, so that year should be treated with caution.
• Most year-to-year changes are within the margin of error of the survey.

This chart appears in Poverty.