Family Economic Well-Being Index
People in poverty using the Supplemental Poverty Measure
13%
People experiencing at least one economic burden
70%
Children experiencing at least one economic burden
81%
What is the Family Economic Well-Being Index?
The Family Economic Well-Being Index measures the economic pressures that families face across four different dimensions of basic needs: housing, food, health care, and child care.
In each dimension, people are classified into four categories of cost burdens: comfortably meeting needs, getting by, burdened, and severely burdened. This lets the Index identify both those experiencing substantial hardship and those who are “getting by” with little margin to spare.
In addition, the Index also looks at who experiences multiple of these burdens simultaneously, or what the Index calls “compounding burdens.” Looking at how burdens compound across the different dimensions together illustrates how a siloed approach to addressing family economic security fails to account for how families actually experience financial hardship.
By providing a more complete picture of families’ lived financial experiences, these insights give policymakers, researchers, and advocates a stronger foundation for understanding families’ economic security and designing policies that reflect how widely these challenges are shared.
For additional information on the data sources and how the Index calculates costs burdens for each dimension, please see the detailed methodology.
Dimensions
Characteristics
Why the Family Economic Well-Being Index Matters
For millions of Americans, financial stability is a constant balancing act. An unexpected expense or a missed paycheck can upend a household budget. Yet many families experiencing this kind of financial strain are not reflected in traditional measures of economic hardship.
Existing poverty measures, such as the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), remain essential for tracking hardship and the impact of anti-poverty programs. These poverty measures tell us if a family’s resources fall below a specific line, but they don’t capture the precariousness or the compounding stress of families above that line.
The Family Economic Well-Being Index examines whether families, including those above the poverty line, struggle to afford housing, food, health care, and child care. It allows us to see exactly which basic needs families are struggling to meet, and to what extent. Using data primarily from the American Community Survey, it classifies people into four categories: comfortably meeting needs, getting by, burdened, and severely burdened.
This lets the Index identify both those experiencing substantial hardship and those who are “getting by” with little margin to spare.
The Family Economic Well-Being Index shows how widespread the affordability crisis has become, and gives policymakers a way to see which families are being squeezed and where existing policies fall short. Some affordability burdens, like food, stay concentrated among families with the lowest incomes, which is exactly the population public benefits programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are designed to reach.
But housing, health care, and child care burdens remain common well into the middle class, where many families earn too much to qualify for assistance yet still can’t comfortably cover the basics.
Strengthening families’ economic well-being will require two kinds of policy: targeted support for families with the lowest incomes and broader efforts to reach the millions of middle-income families who are also under pressure.
Explore the Interactive Map
To learn more about how many families by state are impacted by food, housing, health care, and child care costs, click on the map.
Economic Burden by State
Economic Burden by State - Show Data
Chart data is loading.