Poland
Warsaw | September 2023
PLN 27.83; PLN 8.09 (USD 1.87, EUR 1.74) for food.
This is based on Poland’s extreme poverty threshold and average low income households' expenditure proportion spent on food and non-alcoholic beverages.
Poland annually tracks three poverty measures – extreme (subsistence minimum estimated by the Institute of Labor and Social Studies), relative (50% of mean household expenditure) and legal (qualifying for social benefit under the Law on Social Assistance). Of these, local policies tend to pay more attention to the extreme poverty line to monitor satisfaction of survival and human psychophysical development needs. Relative poverty is used for comparison with other EU countries. Data on poverty, as well as household income and expenditure are collected by Statistics Poland which conducts an annual Household Budget Survey.
In 2022, 4.7% of Polish households were in extreme poverty, 12% in relative poverty, and 7% in legal poverty. Extreme poverty incidence was higher for households headed by persons of lower education qualifications (not higher than lower secondary level), and also for households with at least 3 children / youths. Since 2016, Poland’s extreme poverty rate has remained at a similar level of 4–5%. Its relative poverty rate has seen improvement in comparison to EU countries, having declined from 17.6% in 2008 to 11.8% in 2022.
Note: Latest available standards and exchange rates were taken as of September 2023, when the photography was undertaken.
Understanding More
Economic poverty rates in Poland in 2022
Information on the level and structure of the subsistence minimum in 2022
The situation of households in 2022 on the basis of results of the Household Budget Survey