EuroWire, LONDON: More than 13 million people in the United Kingdom were living in relative poverty in the year to March 2025, according to official government figures that showed little overall movement in the national poverty rate but a rise among pensioners. The Department for Work and Pensions said 13.4 million people were in households below the relative poverty line after housing costs in 2024/25, equivalent to 20% of the population. That compared with 12.93 million people a year earlier, while the headline rate itself was unchanged.
The data, published in the government’s annual Households Below Average Income release, showed that 4 million children were living in relative poverty after housing costs, representing 27% of all children. The rate for working-age adults held at 19%, while the pensioner poverty rate rose to 14% from 12% in 2023/24. The figures cover household income after taxes and benefits and use the standard threshold of 60% of median income, one of the government’s main measures for tracking living standards across the country.
The release also showed that weekly median household disposable income rose in real terms between 2023/24 and 2024/25. Median income reached an estimated £719 before housing costs and £623 after housing costs, both up 5% after adjusting for inflation. Even with that increase, the poverty figures pointed to persistent pressure on lower-income households, with the official data showing no reduction in the overall relative poverty rate after housing costs and no fall in the child poverty rate during the year.
Poverty figures highlight pressure on households
Government statistics showed that 7.5 million people in working households were in relative poverty after housing costs, underlining how employment alone did not prevent low income for many families. Of those, 2.9 million were children. The figures also indicated that pensioners accounted for a larger share of those below the poverty line than a year earlier. The annual release remains one of the government’s principal measures of household income and is closely watched because it combines earnings, taxes, benefits and housing costs into a single view of living standards.
The publication was released as ministers continued to set out measures aimed at easing pressure on family finances. The government has already announced the removal of the two-child limit in Universal Credit from April 2026, but that change falls outside the period covered by the latest dataset. The figures therefore provide a snapshot of living conditions before that policy took effect. They also show that, despite real income gains at the median level, lower-income households remained vulnerable to housing costs and weak financial resilience.
Child poverty remains a central concern
The child poverty count of 4 million means more than one in four children were living below the relative poverty line after housing costs in 2024/25. That rate was unchanged from the previous year, leaving child poverty one of the clearest areas of sustained hardship in the official data. The figures also showed differences across household types, with lone-parent families and larger families continuing to face a higher risk of low income than the population as a whole under the government’s long-running income series.
The latest release reinforces that the overall poverty picture in Britain remains broadly flat in rate terms but substantial in scale, with 13.4 million people affected under the most commonly cited after-housing-costs measure. While median incomes improved, the benefits of that increase were not enough to lower the headline poverty rate or reduce child poverty during the period covered. The rise in pensioner poverty added another area of concern in a dataset that will remain central to the government’s assessment of household living standards.