Poverty Decline Interrupted: Reached 30% of the Population, Adding 600,000 People

In the first quarter of 2026, poverty is estimated to have affected 14.6 million people, 1.8 million more than in the third quarter of 2025, according to data from the Permanent Household Survey (EPH) collected by the consulting firm ExQuanti. Thus, the decline in the index that began after the peak in 2024 would be interrupted, a result of the devaluation by the government of Javier Milei, which pushed poverty up to 52.9%.

Poverty reached 30% in the first quarter of 2026, according to measurements from the UCA Social Debt Observatory. Compared to the third quarter of 2025, there is an increase of 3.1 percentage points (p.p), as during that period the index was at 26.9%. Meanwhile, extreme poverty rose from 6% to 6.5%.

Similarly, the CEDLAS estimate indicated that poverty would have increased by almost 2 points (from 28.2% to 30.1%) between the semesters from July to December 2025 and from October 2025 to March 2026.

According to ExQuanti's data, in the first quarter of the year, 600,000 people fell into poverty compared to the fourth quarter of 2025.

After the shock of 2024, there was a recovery in incomes, coinciding with a decrease in inflation, which halted in September 2025. At the same time, the precarization of the labor market, with the transfer of formal jobs to informal and self-employed positions, generated a downward trend in purchasing power, as reported by Ámbito.

"The increase in informality occurs, moreover, in a context where the recovery of real incomes began to lose momentum. Consequently, although the labor market managed to incorporate new jobs, a growing proportion of these new positions concentrated in lower-quality jobs, with lower levels of social protection and greater income vulnerability alongside a decline in registered salaried employment," highlighted ExQuanti.

Additionally, while total nominal income grew by 35.6% year-on-year, above the baskets that measure the poverty level, income distribution worsened, increasing from 0.435 to 0.442. This implies that the average improvement was not distributed evenly.

Moreover, pensions, retirements, and family allowances, which are updated with a two-month lag, lost purchasing power as inflation accelerated since September of last year, reaching 3.4% due to the international shock in March. Furthermore, the underrepresentation of utility and service expenses currently in the CPI weakens the ability of transfers to support the most vulnerable households.

The proportion of employed people living in poor households increased from 18.1% to 20.6% (+2.5 p.p.) between the third quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, according to UCA's survey based on the EPH. During the same period, the employed in indigent households rose from 3.2% to 3.6%, an increase of 0.4 points.

Overall, this means that one in five workers continues to be poor, and employment has ceased to operate as a protection. In this context, ExQuanti concludes that "the increase in poverty recorded in the last two quarters is consistent with a labor market that, while generating more employment, does so with a more precarious composition and an increasingly diminished capacity to sustain a sustained reduction in poverty."

Although the extraordinary increase in the Universal Child Allowance at the beginning of Javier Milei's term allowed for a reduction in poverty among children, the poverty level now also shows a break. Among children and adolescents aged 0 to 17 years, poverty increased from 39.9% in the third quarter of 2025 to 42.5% in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 2.6 points. The deterioration was more intense among children aged 0 to 4 years, whose level rose from 34.3% to 38.7% (+4.4 points), and among those aged 5 to 12 years, it climbed from 40.6% to 44.2% (+3.6 p.p.).

Among adolescents aged 13 to 17 years, the change was smaller, from 42% to 42.4% (+0.4 p.p). Thus, child poverty was 12.5 points above the general average.

The extreme poverty rate among those aged 0 to 17 also increased, from 8.6% to 9.5%. The deterioration was particularly concentrated among children aged 5 to 12 years, where it rose from 8.4% to 11.4%. In contrast, among children aged 0 to 4 years, it decreased from 5.8% to 5.4%, and among adolescents aged 13 to 17 years, from 10.6% to 9.2%.

"The data still does not show a year-on-year increase in poverty, but it does show an unequivocal interruption of its reduction. Moderating the favorable effect of disinflation and relative prices, distributive weakness, informality, underemployment, and insufficient recovery of labor incomes return to the forefront. The expansion of the analysis confirms that the stability of the national average does not equate to a generalized social improvement," concludes UCA.

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