Public Policy Brief No. 159
June 02, 2026
How Poor Are Employed People in the United States?
Standard measures of poverty suffer from a blind spot: those measures ignore the household labor that transforms purchased products into consumables—the cooking, cleaning, childcare, and numerous other tasks that sustain families and communities.
- Nearly 40 percent more employed Americans are living in poverty than the official measures suggest, once we account for the time needed to meet the demands of household labor.
- To the extent there is a discrepancy between measured economic statistics and households’ more dire perceptions of their own economic struggles, this may be one piece of the puzzle.
- The authors’ findings challenge some commonly held assumptions. They find that:
- Time poverty falls more heavily on those with lower incomes.
- While marriage may reduce time poverty for men, it often increases it for women, particularly mothers, who shoulder a disproportionate share of household production regardless of their employment status.
- Employment alone cannot lift families out of poverty. Pairing job-creation strategies with policies aimed at improving the affordability and supply of care services is essential.
- Employed women face consistently higher rates of time deficits than men. Gender—not race—is the primary fault line when it comes to time poverty, unlike income poverty. That is, the gap in time poverty between men and women within every racial group is far higher than the gap in time poverty between racial groups within each gender.
- Reducing work hours, expanding access to affordable childcare and household services, ensuring living wages that allow workers to purchase time-saving services, and fundamentally redistributing household labor more equitably are all essential interventions.