Definitions: The share of children under age 18 who live in families with incomes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, as defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget.
The federal poverty definition consists of a series of thresholds based on family size and composition. In 2000, a 200% poverty threshold for a family of two adults and two children was $34,926. Poverty status is not determined for people in military barracks, institutional quarters, or for unrelated individuals under age 15 (such as foster children).
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Data Source: Population Reference Bureau, analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Census Supplementary Surveys and American Community Survey.
The data for this measure come from the 2000 and 2001 Supplementary Survey and the 2002 through 2008 American Community Survey (ACS). The 2000 through 2004 ACS surveyed approximately 700,000 households monthly during each calendar year. In general but particularly for these years, use caution when interpreting estimates for less populous states or indicators representing small subpopulations, where the sample size is relatively small. Beginning in January 2005, the U.S. Census Bureau expanded the ACS sample to 3 million households (full implementation), and in January 2006 the ACS included group quarters. The ACS, fully implemented, is designed to provide annually updated social, economic, and housing data for states and communities. (Such local-area data have traditionally been collected once every ten years in the long form of the decennial census
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Footnotes:
Updated October 2009.
S - Estimates suppressed when the confidence interval around the percentage is greater than 10 percentage points. N.A. – Data not available. A 90 percent confidence interval for each estimate can be found at
Children below 200% poverty.
Note: The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are
not included in maps and rankings because they are not states and therefore comparisons on many
indicators of child well being are not meaningful.