The share of American children living in poverty, measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts taxes and benefits and is the fuller gauge. This chart is by year, not by president, because the story is a single dramatic swing: a temporary change to the Child Tax Credit in 2021 cut child poverty to the lowest level ever recorded, and when Congress let that change expire, child poverty more than doubled the next year. It shows what policy can do, and what letting it lapse costs.
Child poverty rate (Supplemental Poverty Measure), by year. Lower is better.
What happened, in one column
Year
Child poverty (SPM)
What changed
2020
9.6%
Pandemic relief (stimulus, expanded unemployment) counted as income
2021
5.1%
Expanded Child Tax Credit: fully refundable, paid monthly. A record low.
2022
12.0%
Congress did not renew the expansion; it lapsed. The largest one-year jump on record.
2023
13.5%
Stayed elevated near pre-pandemic levels
2024
13.5%
Tax and benefit programs still kept ~8.5M children out of poverty
2025
13.4%
Latest available; not a statistically significant change from 2024
Both the record low and the doubling happened under the same president, driven by what Congress did and then declined to renew. That is the honest point of this chart: it is a story about a policy choice, not about a party.
Poverty is an outcome, and the levers here were Congress's. Child poverty tracks the economy, the job market, and above all tax-and-transfer policy. The 2021 expansion and its 2022 expiration were acts of Congress, not solely of the president. Pandemic relief dominates the 2020–2022 swing, so those years should not be read as pure policy skill or failure. The fuller Supplemental Poverty Measure only reaches back to 2009, which is why this chart starts in the mid-2010s rather than at Clinton; a companion measure, real median household income, is charted separately for the longer view. The 2025 figure, the first year of the current term, was published in September 2026 and is statistically unchanged from 2024.