The official U.S. poverty measure uses money income before taxes and excludes noncash benefits such as SNAP, public housing, and Medicaid.
Yes. Census household income can include the income of unrelated people sharing a housing unit, including roommates and lodgers, depending on the survey definition.
BLS states that CPI-U is designed to measure inflation for the U.S. urban population and may not accurately reflect people living in rural areas. It also does not produce official inflation rates for specific subgroups such as older America
In BLS employee-benefit statistics, “access” means a benefit plan is available for an employee to use. “Participation” means the employee is actually participating under the plan’s rules. A worker can therefore have access to a retirement p
The official U.S. unemployment rate is the number of unemployed people divided by the civilian labor force. To be classified as unemployed in the Current Population Survey, a person generally must have had no employment during the reference
BLS average hourly earnings from the payroll survey are calculated from gross payroll divided by hours. They do not include employer-paid benefits such as health insurance or retirement contributions, and they exclude items including irregu
Yes. The official poverty measure does not count noncash benefits such as public housing, Medicaid, or food assistance as money income.
A person can have no job and still be classified as not in the labor force rather than unemployed. Under the Current Population Survey, people without work generally must have actively looked for work during the prior 4 weeks and be availab
BLS “real earnings” are average hourly or weekly earnings adjusted for inflation using a Consumer Price Index. BLS explicitly notes that real-earnings data cannot by themselves measure changes in living standards, which also depend on facto
