The Impact of Precise Geographic Adjustments on the Supplemental Poverty Measure

The official poverty measure of the United States remains unequipped to appropriately capture poverty across America. As a result, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) has increasingly supplanted the official measure in policy analysis and statistics. A primary point of conflict among poverty-focused scholars regarding the SPM is its current geographic adjustment, which adjusts poverty thresholds at three spatial scales: identified metropolitan areas, unidentified metropolitan areas by state, and nonmetropolitan areas by state. Pooling all nonmetropolitan counties within each state into a single adjustment is believed to be responsible for the 'flip' in the rural-urban poverty differential between the official measure and the SPM. Using federally restricted data, we address this conflict and generate novel estimates of the SPM using county-specific, hybrid, and commuting-zone geographic adjustments. Our estimates illustrate the role of the current adjustment in our understanding of rural-urban poverty, while also demonstrating the utility of our preferred commuting-zone-level adjustment.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11113-026-09995-1.