After worsening significantly during the coronavirus pandemic, a key metric shows household poverty shrinking modestly in Connecticut between 2023 and 2024.
But officials at the United Way of Connecticut fear their latest report — which shows 39% of all households couldn’t afford a basic survival budget in 2024 — understates a problem that is worsening yet again.
The nonprofit on Thursday released its annual review of Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained [and] Employed — or ALICE — households. Designed as an alternative to the longstanding Federal Poverty Level metric, the ALICE methodology takes into account the costs of food, housing, utilities, childcare, healthcare and transportation.
The United Way found 570,000 households couldn’t cover a full budget in 2024. That’s down from last year’s analysis, which found a record high 581,000 households came up short in 2023.
The basic survival budget for a family of four — two parents and two children — remained constant at $116,000.
But officials at the United Way’s Connecticut chapter, said a closer look paints a more disturbing picture. The number of households that couldn’t cover a survival budget in 2024 was still up 14.5% from before the COVID pandemic.
And while households in poverty are common in Connecticut’s urban centers, much of the recent growth has come elsewhere, said Daniel Fitzmaurice, director of advocacy for the United Way.
“We’re seeing increases in New Milford and Chester and Deep River and some of our clearly more suburban and rural places,” he said, adding the tendency is to view such communities “as kind of sheltered from the economic hardships that have faced our cities for a long time, and that’s just not the case anymore.”
More importantly, the 2024 numbers don’t reflect human service program cuts ordered in 2025 by Congress and President Donald Trump, said Lisa Tepper Bates, president and CEO of the United Way’s Connecticut Chapter.
An omnibus measure referred to by supporters as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is projected to cut more than $1.1 trillion from healthcare, nutrition and other assistance programs by 2034 to help finance an estimated $4.5 trillion in federal tax cuts.
Connecticut already has seen nearly 63,000 people lose Supplemental Nutrition Assistance benefits, and state officials recently warned roughly 110,000 poor adults could lose Medicaid coverage by January.
Another 143,000 residents lost a collective $295 million in federal tax subsidies last winter that had helped them purchase health insurance on the state exchange. Gov. Ned Lamont used $115 million in state surplus dollars to partially offset that loss.
Together with rising inflation, “It’s hard to imagine these [ALICE] numbers are better in 2026,” Bates said. “We have heard from enough people they cannot afford to put enough gas in the tank to get to work.”
The United Way of Connecticut and other anti-poverty nonprofits have used the ALICE reports and related data to press Lamont and the General Assembly to enact a new state income tax credit for poor and middle-class households with children.
Nearly two-thirds of the 36-member Senate and 76 out of 151 members of the House of Representatives cosponsored bills last spring to create a child tax credit.
But leaders of the Democrat-controlled legislature left that option out of the latest state budget they negotiated with Lamont. The governor, a fiscal moderate, has said he prefers relief proposals that can benefit a broader group, such as a reduction in state income tax rates.
Advocates say governmental agencies’ continued reliance on the Federal Poverty Level measure leads many to underestimate Connecticut’s poverty problem.
The federal metric, developed in the mid-1960s by U.S. Social Security Administration economists and based largely on the cost of a minimum food diet, says a family of four was impoverished if its income was $31,200 or less in 2024. That’s 27% of the survival budget the ALICE methodology insists is necessary here.
About 11% of Connecticut households fall below the federal poverty level, according to the United Way. “It’s a different thing to think of 39% to 40% of your population struggling every month,” Bates said.
