In Massachusetts, between 2019-2021:
- Food insecurity in Massachusetts averaged 8.40%.
- Massachusetts’s food insecurity rate was 19% lower than the national average of 10.4%.
- The poverty rate in Massachusetts in 2021 (using the Supplemental Poverty Measure) was 8.0%, which was 0.2 percentage points higher than the nation overall (7.8%).
- Massachusetts’s poverty rate is higher than the national average in large part because of the high cost of housing. Four in 10 low-income people in Massachusetts are homeless or pay over half their income for rent.
- SNAP, alone, lifted 125,000 people above the poverty line in Massachusetts, including 45,000 children, per year between 2013 and 2017, on average.
