Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo
Data

Total population living in extreme poverty by world region

Historical estimates with projections – World Bank

What you should know about this indicator

  • The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $3 per day. This threshold, known as the , is set so that poverty can be compared across countries. This indicator plays an important and successful role in focusing the world's attention on the very poorest people. The UN uses this indicator to track progress towards ending extreme poverty by 2030.
  • Two centuries ago, most of the world's population was extremely poor. Many believed that widespread poverty was inevitable. But this turned out to be wrong. Economic growth is possible, and poverty can decline. With this poverty line, we can track whether countries are leaving the worst poverty behind.
  • This data is expressed in constant international dollars to adjust for inflation and differences in living costs between countries. Read more in our article, What are international dollars?
  • Many people, today and in the past, have no monetary income. This data accounts for this by including the estimated value of non-market income, such as food grown by subsistence farmers for their own use.
  • The data refers to income (after taxes and benefits) or to consumption, .
  • This data combines data based on household surveys or extrapolated up until the year of the data release using GDP per capita growth estimates and forecasts, with projections from 2027-2030 based on GDP per capita growth projections from the World Bank's Global Economic Prospects (January 2026), supplemented by IMF's World Economic Outlook (October 2025). For the period 2031-2050, the data is projected using the average annual historical GDP per capita growth over 2015-2024.
Total population living in extreme poverty by world region
Historical estimates with projections – World Bank
Number of people living in households with an income or consumption below $3 per day
Source
Lakner et al. (2025) (updated using World Bank PIP in March 2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 25, 2026
Next expected update
September 2026
Date range
1981–2050
Unit
people

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Lakner et al. – Poverty projections from World Bank PIP

This dataset was created using the March 2026 vintage of Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP). This dataset contains a series of country-level and global-level poverty rate projections up to 2050, updating the projections reported in Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report (2024). The methodology and the reproducibility package for the projections can be found here.

Retrieved on
April 2, 2026
Retrieved from
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0067066/pip-poverty-projections
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Lakner, C., Genoni, M. E., Stemmler, H., Yonzan, N., & Tetteh Baah, S. K. (2025). Reproducibility package for Poverty, Prosperity and Planet Report 2024. World Bank. https://doi.org/10.60572/01JA-MK74. Updated with Poverty and Inequality Platform (March 2026).

This dataset was created using the March 2026 vintage of Poverty and Inequality Platform (PIP). This dataset contains a series of country-level and global-level poverty rate projections up to 2050, updating the projections reported in Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report (2024). The methodology and the reproducibility package for the projections can be found here.

Retrieved on
April 2, 2026
Retrieved from
https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0067066/pip-poverty-projections
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Lakner, C., Genoni, M. E., Stemmler, H., Yonzan, N., & Tetteh Baah, S. K. (2025). Reproducibility package for Poverty, Prosperity and Planet Report 2024. World Bank. https://doi.org/10.60572/01JA-MK74. Updated with Poverty and Inequality Platform (March 2026).

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

We obtained regional estimates of the number in poverty by summing the number of people in poverty in each region. For global estimates, we proceeded in a similar way, but summing the regional data. To calculate the share in poverty, we divided these results by the total population in each region or globally, and multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Total population living in extreme poverty by world region”, part of the following publication: Joe Hasell, Bertha Rohenkohl, Pablo Arriagada, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2022) - “Poverty”. Data adapted from Lakner et al.. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260413-090342/grapher/projections-extreme-poverty-wb.html [online resource] (archived on April 13, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Lakner et al. (2025) (updated using World Bank PIP in March 2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Lakner et al. (2025) (updated using World Bank PIP in March 2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Total population living in extreme poverty by world region – World Bank – Historical estimates with projections” [dataset]. Lakner et al., “Poverty projections from World Bank PIP” [original data]. Retrieved April 13, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260413-090342/grapher/projections-extreme-poverty-wb.html (archived on April 13, 2026).

Download

Quick download

You can download the visualization as an image or download the chart data.