Census offers new snapshot of Mass. income, poverty

A new federal report shows that roughly 9% of Massachusetts residents are in poverty, a rate that it describes as being “significantly lower” than in 20 other states and the nation as a whole and “significantly higher” than eight peer states.

The U.S. Census Bureau released a trove of reports and data on 2025 income, poverty and health insurance coverage levels nationally Tuesday. The releases showed that real median household income was $87,460 last year, the highest since records began in 1967, and that the official poverty rate fell 0.5 percentage points to 10.2%. There were 26.7 million Americans (or 7.9%) who were uninsured for the entire year, the bureau reported.

State-level data on poverty was released in the form of three-year averages, with Massachusetts’ average landing at 9.1%, down a tenth of a percentage point from the three-year average reported a year ago. That puts the Bay State toward the low-poverty end of the 50-state spectrum: below the national rate and 20 states plus D.C., statistically tied with 21 other states, and with higher poverty than the eight lowest-poverty states.

The eight states that the Census Bureau found had significantly lower poverty than Massachusetts over the three-year span were Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, Vermont, Delaware, Maryland, Utah and New Hampshire.

The national three-year average poverty rate was 10.7%. The states with significantly higher poverty rates were Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, Alabama, Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia, District of Columbia, Nevada, Texas, Michigan, Florida, South Carolina, New York, Ohio, California, Arizona and Tennessee.

Massachusetts featured more prominently in a paper published Tuesday by the Census Bureau, this one looking at the “substantial effect” that state and federal tax policies have on the economic wellbeing of American households.

Using pooled data from tax years 2023, 2024 and 2025, the paper estimated state income tax liability, state credits, and post-tax income by state. Massachusetts had the highest median household pretax income at $114,600, and the highest median household post-tax income at $95,530, though in both cases a few states were close to Massachusetts and within the margin of error. At the other end of the rankings was Mississippi, where the median household post-tax income was recorded as $51,890.

The Census Bureau paper estimated a median state income tax liability of $4,206 and a median federal tax liability of $15,750, with a median total tax liability calculated separately at $19,850 for a Bay Stater.

The median state liability puts Massachusetts near the top of a range that runs from a national low (among states that levy an income tax) of $1,331 in state tax liability in North Dakota to $6,172 in Maryland. The state and total liabilities here are lower than only Maryland and Washington, D.C.

Colin Young is the deputy editor for State House News Service and State Affairs Pro Massachusetts. Reach him at [email protected].