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Global poverty estimates up to 2023 were updated today on the Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP), including nowcasted estimates up to 2025. The update includes three main changes to the PIP data (See the What’s New document for more details): First, the update brings new survey data for several country-years, including important updates to data from India; second, it includes the adoption of the 2021 Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs); and third, based on the new PPPs and new survey data, including new national poverty lines, the update revises the global poverty lines.
As a result of these combined changes, the global extreme poverty rate in 2022 is revised up from 9.0 to 10.5 percent, corresponding to an increase in the number of individuals living below the international poverty line from 713 to 838 million (see Table 1). At the regional level, all regions see upward revisions, most notably Sub-Saharan Africa (where the extreme poverty rate goes from 37.0 percent to 45.5 percent in 2022), except for South Asia (with a downward revision from 9.7 to 7.3 percent). Based on nowcasted estimates, global extreme poverty is projected to decrease from 10.5 percent in 2022 to 9.9 percent in 2025 (see Figure 1).
Table 1: Global and regional extreme poverty in 2022, comparison between September 2024 ($2.15, 2017 PPPs) and June 2025 vintages ($3.00, 2021 PPPs)
i. New & revised data: This June 2025 update brings an additional 74 country-year datapoints to the PIP database, including two new countries: Barbados and Equatorial Guinea, whilst improving existing data for another 90 country-years. As a result, the PIP database now contains over 2,400 survey-year observations from 172 countries. With new data for Egypt, the survey coverage in the Middle East and North Africa has improved substantially. However, coverage for Sub-Saharan Africa in recent years remains limited, largely due to the unavailability of recent data for Nigeria, and as a result, the estimates for the region after 2019 are subject to additional uncertainty. The new datapoints also include the 2022 survey data for India, which implies a revision to its consumption methodology, and affects the estimates for South Asia, as well as global figures due its population size.
ii. Adoption of 2021 PPPs: The International Comparison Program (ICP) released 2021 Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs) in May 2024. The 2021 PPPs provide updated information on the price levels of goods and services across countries, while keeping the methodology largely unchanged from the 2017 PPPs. These are adopted in the current update of PIP in line with previous decisions to update poverty estimates with new PPPs when these are driven by new price information and not changes in the ICP methodology. A legacy series using the 2017 PPPs continues to be available in PIP.
iii. New poverty lines: The adoption of new PPPs requires a re-estimation of the global poverty lines. The international poverty line — also called the extreme poverty line — is revised from $2.15 to $3.00, while the two other poverty lines more applicable to lower-middle and upper-middle income countries are revised from $3.65 to $4.20, and from $6.85 to $8.30, respectively. All three global poverty lines are derived from national poverty lines around the world that reflect countries’ own assessments of what it means to be poor. Specifically, the three lines are based on the median national poverty line (in PPP terms) within the respective income group.
The change in the lines between PPP rounds is explained by changes in both the PPPs and the underlying national poverty lines. In fact, for the international poverty line, most of the change in the line from $2.15 to $3.00 is explained by changes in the underlying national poverty lines, as explained in more detail in the background paper. A recent blog goes into more detail on how improved consumption methodologies affect national poverty lines. Another blog post , in light of changing consumption methodologies, this updating of the poverty lines aims to more accurately reflect global poverty levels.
While revised poverty lines, underlying data revisions, and changes in PPPs affect the level of poverty, from a historical lens, the trends remain similar. The following graph shows the estimated poverty rates by regions since 1990. The graph also depicts the updated nowcasts of poverty following the methodology introduced in the September 2024 update. The nowcast suggests a modest decline in the global extreme poverty rate from 10.5 percent in 2022 to 9.9 percent in 2025. Based on the latest data, the South Asia region experienced the most significant decline in extreme poverty between 2022 and 2025. Conversely, the Middle East and North Africa was the only region to experience an increase in poverty during this period, up from 8.5 percent in 2022 to 9.4 percent in 2025.
Figure 1: Global and regional poverty trends, 1990–2025
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The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the UK Government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Program.
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