THE sharp drop in the country’s official poverty rate masks a deeper income problem, with millions of Filipino workers still earning far below what their families need for a decent standard of living, research group IBON Foundation said.
This, after the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) reported that poverty incidence among Filipinos fell to 9.7 percent in 2025 from 15.5 percent in 2023, translating to about 11.08 million poor Filipinos from 17.5 million two years earlier.
IBON said the improvement does not necessarily mean that most Filipinos have achieved economic security, arguing that the government’s poverty threshold remains too low to capture the actual cost of living.
For 2025, the annual per-capita poverty threshold stood at P35,121, or about P96.22 per person per day. For a family of five, this is equivalent to only about P14,634 in monthly income.
‘This means a family earning even slightly more than this is officially considered non-poor, without considering the high costs of food, housing, electricity, transportation, education, healthcare and other basic expenses,’ IBON said.
This stands in sharp contrast to the group’s family living wage estimate of P1,277 per day for a family of five as of July 2026, or more than twice the P512 average minimum wage nationwide.
At P512, the average minimum wage covers only around 40 percent of IBON’s estimated living wage for a family of five, leaving a substantial gap between what workers legally earn and what families need for a decent life.
Meanwhile, PSA said the decline in poverty was driven by faster growth in family incomes relative to the poverty threshold.
Mean annual per-capita income grew 22 percent between 2023 and 2025, compared with a 5.5-percent increase in the annual per-capita poverty threshold.
Income among families near the poverty threshold also increased faster than the threshold, with mean annual per-capita income in the first and second deciles rising by 23.8 percent and 22.7 percent, respectively, PSA said.
IBON argued, however, that measuring progress by the number of Filipinos who cross the official poverty line risks understating the scale of economic hardship, particularly among workers whose incomes remain insufficient for basic needs.
The group also questioned the poverty methodology, saying the food threshold is based on a bare-minimum, least-cost basket while non-food requirements are not directly and adequately cost.
IBON said government programs such as the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program, Social Pension, KADIWA, Walang Gutom, TUPAD and the DOLE Integrated Livelihood and Emergency Employment Program remain important safety nets but cannot substitute for higher and more stable incomes.
It called for stronger domestic industries and agriculture, higher wages and better public services to generate stable livelihoods instead of relying primarily on temporary assistance to push households above a statistical poverty line.
The group said genuine poverty reduction should ultimately be measured not only by how many Filipinos move above the official threshold, but by how many can afford secure lives through decent work and adequate incomes.