The Country’s 2025 Poverty Rate Came Out September 15. L.A. Has No 2025 Numbers.

A June Commerce order barred the Census Bureau’s privacy method, and the survey that measures Los Angeles has no release date.

The Census Bureau published the country's 2025 income and poverty figures on September 15, on schedule. Median household income was $87,460, the highest on record. The official poverty rate fell to 10.2 percent. None of it describes Los Angeles. The survey that does — the American Community Survey — put out its 2024 one-year estimates on September 11 last year. Its 2025 tables have no date at all: the Bureau's own update page says the release date "is being determined," and has said so since August 6.

The reason is an order the Department of Commerce issued in June. DAO 216-26, "Disclosure Avoidance for Statistical Products," governs how the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis keep individual households from being identifiable inside published tables. It applies to every statistical product the two agencies put out, and it narrows the toolkit to two methods.

George M. Cook, performing the duties of the director, set out what that means on the Bureau's site on August 17. Coarsening — "reducing the detail of data (for example, grouping ages into ranges or rounding)" — is the preferred approach. Suppression, withholding a value outright, is the last resort. Noise infusion, the family that includes "statistical methods such as record swapping and the use of synthetic data," is no longer permitted. Data already published stays as published. The American Community Survey's full transition to the new rules, the post says, is 2029.

The delay and the on-time release were announced in the same advisory. On August 4 the Bureau set September 15 for the Current Population Survey's income, poverty and health-insurance reports, and in the next breath said the 2025 ACS one-year date was still being determined while it sought "DAO-compliant solutions to allow the release of the ACS 1-year tables later this year."

That split lands harder in Los Angeles than the wording suggests, and the Bureau explains why itself. Its guidance on which survey to use calls the Current Population Survey supplement "the source of official national poverty estimates, hence it is the preferred source for national analysis," and says that "because of its large sample size, the ACS is preferred for subnational data on income and poverty by detailed demographic characteristics." The national number came out on time. The local one is the one that didn't.

Twenty-seven cities out of 88

We pulled the 2024 one-year file for every place in Los Angeles County and counted what's in it. Twenty-eight places appear. Twenty-seven of them are incorporated cities, out of the county's 88. The twenty-eighth, East Los Angeles, isn't a city at all. The cutoff is the Bureau's: one-year estimates are published for areas of 65,000 people or more, and everywhere smaller waits for the five-year file.

So Long Beach, Santa Clarita, Glendale, Lancaster, Palmdale, Pomona, Torrance, Pasadena, Downey, West Covina, El Monte, Burbank, Inglewood, Norwalk, South Gate, Compton, Carson, Santa Monica, Whittier, Hawthorne, Alhambra, Lakewood, Bellflower, Baldwin Park, Redondo Beach and Lynwood get an annual read, along with the city of Los Angeles. Beverly Hills, Culver City and West Hollywood aren't in the file. Between them the 28 places that are cover 7,088,510 of the 9,600,775 county residents the survey's poverty table counts — three-quarters of the people, in under a third of the cities.

The last numbers there are

Which makes the 2024 file, released on September 11 last year, the most recent single-year account of how this county lives. For now it is also the next one.

Median gross rent in the city of Los Angeles was $1,958 a month, give or take $21; countywide, $2,003. The median renter household spent 34.4 percent of its income on rent inside the city and 34.0 percent across the county. Of the 904,856 city renter households whose rent share the Bureau could compute, 529,640 paid at least 30 percent of their income in rent — 58.5 percent of them — and 286,484 paid at least half. Countywide, the same two counts are 1,037,725 and 546,432.

This is a renters' city by a wide margin: 949,439 of its 1,480,869 occupied homes, or 64.1 percent, against 54.4 percent countywide. Some 170,724 of those city households — 11.5 percent — lived at more than one person per room, the Bureau's crowding line, and 88,219 lived at more than one and a half. Of the 1,668,991 city residents who travel to a workplace, 211,392 spend an hour or more getting there and 59,651 spend 90 minutes or more. Median household income was $82,263 in the city and $90,845 countywide. Below the poverty line: 606,316 people in the city, 16.0 percent, and 1,275,371 in the county, 13.3 percent.

That last pair is not comparable to the 10.2 percent the Bureau published last week — different survey, different year, different measure. Which is the whole problem. The Los Angeles figure that would be comparable is the one with no release date.

The five-year file can't stand in

There is other ACS data, and it reaches every city in the county, down to the census tract. The 2020–2024 five-year estimates came out on January 29 of this year. But their newest year is 2024 as well, so they can't say anything about 2025 either, and blending five years is what a one-year file exists to avoid. In the five-year file, median gross rent reads $1,933 in the city and $1,954 countywide — $25 and $49 below the single-year numbers for 2024 alone — and median household income reads $81,939 and $90,112. Neither August notice mentions the 2021–2025 five-year file at all.

Who's asking for it

On September 4, more than 100 organizations wrote to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to say the hold should end. The letter, posted by the Institute for Higher Education Policy on September 8, calls it "an indefinite delay" and says the release "is being delayed as a direct result of a new order that the Department of Commerce issued in June." The signers are the people who open the file: the National Association of Counties, the National Association of Home Builders, the American Statistical Association, the League of Women Voters, Meals on Wheels America, Nielsen.

California's names on it are the state's own demographers — its member of the Census Bureau's Federal-State Cooperative for Population Estimates — plus the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network, Equality California and the Grove Foundation. We read the signature block to the end. The only local government from California on it is Alameda County's public health department. Nothing from Los Angeles.

Commerce has the next move; the Bureau has said it is looking for a compliant way to publish. As of Wednesday, its updates page carries nothing newer than the August 6 sentence promising the tables "later this year." Until that changes, the most recent year Los Angeles can describe itself in is 2024, in a file published on September 11, 2025 — a year and twelve days ago.