2017 poverty guidelines released

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week released its poverty guidelines for 2017.

For the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia, the 2017 guidelines are $12,060 for one person and $4,180 for each additional person. A four-person family, then, would have a guideline of $24,600.

The announcement stated that the Census Bureau uses a different standard when calculating the number of poor persons, called poverty thresholds. In the thresholds used by the Census Bureau for 2016, one person under age 65 meets the threshold with an income of $12,486; one person age 65 or older has a threshold of $11,511.

Those numbers increase for households with two or more adults or one adult with one or more children. Additional information on the Census Bureau figures is available at http://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-poverty-thresholds.html