Children who grow up in poverty are 5 times more likely to be poor young adults: new study

Melbourne, About 757,000 Australian children aged under 15 lived in poverty in 2022-23 – more than all the people living in the cities of Geelong, Newcastle and Wollongong combined. Children who grow up in poverty are 5 times more likely to be poor young adults: new studyThat's about one in six Australian children, according to the latest estimates from the Australian Council of Social Service and UNSW Sydney.

But what happens to these children as they grow older? Do the disadvantages of growing up below the poverty line disappear as they finish school, find jobs and establish their own households? Our research, recently published in The Economic Record, suggests childhood poverty casts a long shadow, affecting young Australians well into their 20s and 30s.

We used data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, which has followed Australian households since 2001. We examined 2,205 people whose childhood household incomes were observed in at least three years, and whose incomes were known at least once again from age 24.

This allowed us to examine whether growing up in poverty was associated with an increased risk of experiencing poverty as adults, aged 24 to 35. Australia does not have an official poverty line. So we defined poverty using a relative income measure, widely used in international research.

This takes into account household disposable income and is adjusted for household size. We found children growing up below the poverty line had a 22.4 percentage points higher risk of living in poverty in their 20s and early 30s than those who grew up in households with incomes between 150 per cent and 200 per cent of the poverty line.

To be clear, 200 per cent of the poverty line, the upper limit of the childhood income of the reference group, is still not even close to being wealthy. It's simply the median income: about USD 144,000 for a couple with two children.

What this means is that Australians who grow up poor face a 27 per cent risk of being in poverty in early adulthood, in contrast to just 5 per cent in the reference group. That's more than five times the risk. We also looked at others who grew up in near-poverty, with household incomes between 100 per cent and 150 per cent of the poverty line, or roughly USD 72,000 to USD 108,000 for a couple with two children.

They also had a higher poverty rate in early adulthood: 8.7 percentage points higher than children from the reference group. By contrast, we found no statistically significant differences in early adulthood poverty between the income group just below the median and those who grew up in households with higher incomes.

A 'double whammy' for kids from single-parent families Australia has 1.2 million single-parent families. Children in those families are especially vulnerable to poverty persisting into early adulthood. According to 2026 ACOSS–UNSW research, 37 per cent of children in sole-parent families were living in poverty in 2022–23, compared with 11 per cent of children in partnered families.

Low-income single-parent families face compounding pressures: even beyond obvious financial pressures, one parent also has to carry out all the unpaid work of child care and household tasks. Not only are children in single-parent families more likely to experience poverty, but our research showed that poverty is more persistent into adulthood, likely because of those compounding pressures.

It's a double whammy. In August 2025, Swinburne University researchers surveyed 2,590 Australian single parents, who were mostly women.