The supplemental poverty measure – an alternate way of gauging poverty, that takes more factors into account – also dropped significantly, falling by 1 percentage point, to 14.3 percent.
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After years of watching their incomes go nowhere, America’s middle class finally got a big raise last year.
Real median household income rose 5.2% during the year, the first annual increase in median household incomes since 2007.
Fresh yearly data from the U.S. Census Bureau showed median, inflation-adjusted household income rose 5.2 percent to $56,516 in 2015, the highest level since $57,423 in 2007, when the recession began.
In a separate report, Census also noted that the uninsured rate declined by 1.3 percentage points between 2014 and 2015.
With many more Americans signing up for private insurance through new marketplaces created by Obamacare, the number of people who were uninsured for part or all of past year came down to 29 million, from 33 million without medical coverage in 2014.
Last year, 29 million people did not have health insurance, representing 9.1 percent of the population.
Taking such programs into account, the Census Bureau put the 2015 so-called supplemental US poverty rate at 14.3 per cent, one percentage point lower than in 2014.
The supplemental measure showed that non-cash public assistance, such as food stamps, housing vouchers and refundable tax credits, helped lift many Americans out of poverty. That declined to 43.1 million past year.
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At the same time, the percentage of people without health insurance coverage decreased.
