Oregon Progress and Poverty, 2023 Edition
September 12, 2024
by Josh Lehner
This morning the Census Bureau released the 2023 American Community Survey data. As a reminder, this data is our best annual look at the socio-economic characteristics of Oregonians. Our office mines this data every year, especially once the microdata comes out in a month, to better understand what is happening when it comes to income, employment, working from home, household formation and the like, and then broken down by age, race and ethnicity, region of the state and so on. Today, in my last post on this site, I am going to provide the typical high-level summary when it comes to household income and poverty in Oregon. Look out for either future posts from Carl, Jordan, and Mitchell, or in our next forecast document which is coming out November 20th for more details on what the 2023 ACS data show.
Big picture, the good news is the typical Oregon household's income has never been higher even after accounting for inflation. Oregon's median household income increased 6% before inflation in 2023, and 2.1% in real, or inflation-adjusted terms last year. That increase ranked 6th highest nationwide across all states. Over the entire cycle to date, 2019 to 2023, Oregon's median income increased 19.5% in nominal terms, although that's just 2.8% in real terms due to the surge in inflation, which ranks 21st strongest across the country. As of 2023, Oregon's median household income was 3.1% higher than the national median, making our relative vantage point today the highest on record going back to the 1970 Census (which is when my file started, in part because in older decennial census the measure was family income not household income).