Total population living in extreme poverty by world regionHistorical estimates with projections
- Description
Number of people living in households with an income or consumption below $3 per day.
- Data source
- Lakner et al. (2025) (updated using World Bank PIP in September 2026) – with major processing by Our World in Data
- Unit
- people
- Date range
- 1981-2050
- Last updated
- 2026-09-22
- Next expected update
- 2027-03-21
- Managed by
- Pablo Arriagada
- The World Bank defines extreme poverty as living on less than $3 per day. This threshold, known as the "International Poverty Line", 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?
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- 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, per capita.
- 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 (June 2026), complemented by the World Bank's Macro Poverty Outlook (April 2026) and the IMF's World Economic Outlook (April 2026). For the period 2031-2050, the data is projected using the average annual historical GDP per capita growth over 2015-2024.
Frequently asked questions
How did Our World in Data process this data?
How did Our World in Data process this 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.
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.
Data sources
Lakner et al. – Poverty projections from World Bank PIP
Lakner et al. – Poverty projections from World Bank PIP
This dataset was created using the September 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.
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 (September 2026).How to cite
How to cite this page
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/20261002-133008/grapher/projections-extreme-poverty-wb.html [online resource] (archived on October 2, 2026).How to cite this data
How to cite this data
If 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 September 2026) – with major processing by Our World in DataFull citation
Lakner et al. (2025) (updated using World Bank PIP in September 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 October 2, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261002-133008/grapher/projections-extreme-poverty-wb.html (archived on October 2, 2026).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. 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.
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