Income as a percentage of the federal poverty level

CPS
1

How do you calculate the income as a percentage of the federal poverty level? What variables are required to calculate this value?

2

I am assuming you are referring to the data available in IPUMS CPS in this question. Please let me know if I am incorrect. This page on the IPUMS CPS website provides detailed information about replicating official poverty rates. In particular, this page discusses each of the variables you’ll need to replicate official poverty rate estimates. It also provides a discussion about the methodological choices used by the “official” Census Bureau poverty rate estimates and to other estimates using alternative methodologies.

3

This is helpful. Thank you! I do have a follow-up question. I use IPUMS for on-line data analysis. With ACS data, I can define rows and columns as a range of income, measured as a percentage of the federal poverty level (FPL).

That is an analytic capacity essential to producing certain policy-relevant results. As you know, FPL ranges define eligibility for many public programs. For example, a state that expands Medicaid for adults, as permitted by the Affordable Care Act, covers adults ages 19-64 with incomes up to 138% of FPL. It would be very helpful to use CPS-ASEC to analyze the characteristics of uninsured state residents with incomes up to 138% FPL. How can we do this?

Many thanks,
Stan Dorn

4

The IPUMS CPS has a number of variables available that are helpful for replicating the official poverty statistics. Here is a link to a page dedicated to discussing this topic. In short you can use OFFTOTVAL and OFFCUTOFF to generate the type of variable you describe as available on IPUMS USA. Alternatively, the POVERTY variable identifies individuals as being in categories representing their income at various levels of percent above or below the poverty line.

5

A post was split to a new topic: Income as a percentage of the federal poverty level (FPL) using ACS data