Illinois: A Hunger and Poverty Snapshot

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In Illinois, between 2019-2021:

  • Food insecurity in Illinois averaged 9.4%.
  • Illinois’s food insecurity rate was 10% lower than the national average of 10.4%.
  • The official poverty rate (which does not account for income from safety-net and tax-support programs such as SNAP, EITC, and others) in the state averaged 9.3%.
  • But using the Supplemental Poverty Measure (which does include safety-net and tax-support income), the poverty rate falls to 7.4%. In other words, these programs reduced the poverty rate in Illinois by 20% and the number of people living in poverty by 191,000.
  • SNAP, alone, lifted 285,000 people above the poverty line in Illinois, including 139,000 children, per year between 2013 and 2017, on average.

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