This year’s print of $56,516 (compared to last year’s $53,718 total) was the first annual increase in this key metric since 2007, the year before the most recent recession began.
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The share of Americans with health insurance continued to increase and only 9.1 per cent of the population had no health insurance past year, noted Census Bureau. Bread for the World is encouraged by this significant improvement, but points out that 43.1 million Americans are still living in poverty. 2 percent, MS in the top spot at 22 percent.
Median household income in the United States rose last year for the first time in eight years, providing welcome relief for Americans struggling to make ends meet, U.S. officials said on Tuesday (Sept 13).
The metro area with the lowest gender gap was the Brownsville-Harlingen area, where the median income for women was $4,728 less than it was for men.
“If you had asked me yesterday, I would have said I was expecting a decline [in poverty rates] of about half a percentage point”, he said.
The data released today are based on surveys, and the comparisons between the two years are not exact, the report said.
For example, the Census reported a 5.2 percent rise in the nation’s median household income from 2014 to 2015 – the first increase since 2007 and one of the largest annual gains since 1967 to 1968.
This is a stunning report, indicating that middle income earners in the U.S.at long last are experiencing some relief after the Great Recession – a development that bodes well for retailers that have struggled to cater to households wary of the state of their finances. Overall, the poverty rate fell from 14.8 percent of the United States population to 13.5 percent, with gains for kids, the elderly, and all types of American families.
That comes as the nation’s real median income rose 3.8 percent to $55,775, according to the Census survey data.
“If you plot all the years, you see some up and down”, he said, adding, “You could over-sample people with low income in one year”.
But when the state’s high cost of living is factored in, California’s rate is more than 20 percent.
Income stagnation had become a hallmark of the post-recession years, hobbling families who were facing higher expenses for everything from education to housing while their earnings went sideways.
The data was 2.4 per cent lower than the peak level of the median household income of $57,909 in 1999, the bureau said.
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The percentage of people without health insurance coverage for the entire 2015 calendar year was 9.1 percent, down from 10.4 percent in 2014.
