Core indicator
Poverty
Children in households in absolute poverty
Last updated March 2024
(March 2024)
Last reviewed: April 2025
Why are we looking at poverty and how are we measuring it?
Poverty is widely perceived as a key cause of violence affecting children and is an important contextual factor for us to consider in our work. We’ll be publishing an evidence review estimating the extent of the effect later this year.
There is no agreed single measure of poverty. As our core measure, we’ve used the proportion of children in households in absolute poverty after housing costs. Absolute poverty is defined as the share of individuals whose household income (adjusted for inflation) is below 60% of the median income in 2010. This gives us a measure of how much the poorest households earn.
What does our core indicator show?
Overall, this measure shows a mixed picture. Over the past decade, absolute poverty has broadly been falling. However, the past two years have shown meaningful increases. In the latest year (2023/24), an estimated 3.85 million children were living in poverty in the United Kingdom, equivalent to 26% of all children. This is up 1.4%pts on the previous year (2022/23), but remains 1.9% below where it was ten years ago (2013/14).