COVID-19 POLICY & RESEARCH

The COVID-19 crisis upended the US poverty and policy landscape. We developed new measurement tools to track the unfolding crisis in real-time. Our poverty forecasting revealed the pandemic had the potential to result in the highest poverty rates in 50 years. To further help inform the policy debate and decision-making, we rapidly analyzed proposals for federal emergency relief: assessing what families will need during the crisis, how repurposing existing programs, like the Child Tax Credit, can help deliver cash assistance quickly, and identifying who was left out of early rounds of emergency relief. As the government took action to address the crisis, we found that the federal pandemic relief efforts, such as the CARES Act, prevented the worst of the predicted outcomes in 2020. Our poverty forecasts for 2021and 2022 demonstrate the importance of continued economic relief.

We continue to track the impact of the pandemic economic crisis through monthly poverty estimates. Our monthly poverty data page offers a real-time data tracker on poverty trends for the U.S. population, by age group, and by race and ethnicity and is a tool to help assess the impact of policy changes, such as the expiration of pandemic unemployment benefits or the introduction of monthly Child Tax Credit payments.