The Poverty Area Measures Data Product

by Tracey Farrigan and Austin Sanders

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Poverty Area Measures (PAM) data product is designed to improve understanding of the geography of poverty in the United States. This report contains historical and technical documentation from the November 2022 version of PAM. Examples provided in this report are from 1960 through 2019, but the lessons will be applicable to PAM data in the future. PAM includes four measures of poverty: high, extreme, persistent, and the newly developed measure of enduring poverty. The methodology for the 2022 version of PAM incorporates reliability metrics to account for margins of error of the underlying data. The methodology also uniquely includes comparable U.S. county- and census tract-level geography and data years (except for census tracts in 1960, given limited tract geography prior to 1970).

Keywords: poverty area measures, high poverty, persistent poverty, extreme poverty, enduring poverty, rural, nonmetropolitan

In this publication...

• Entire Report
• Report summary