Key Details
The World Bank’s Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2026: Jobs at the Center of Poverty Eradication tracks poverty, shared prosperity and environmental risks. This edition adds a global analysis linking household poverty with the work and earnings of household members.
Measure | Finding |
|---|---|
Extreme poverty worldwide | An estimated 811 million people, or about one in ten, live below US$3 a day in 2026. The rate has been broadly unchanged since 2019. |
Poverty above the extreme line | 3.7 billion people live below US$8.30 a day, the World Bank’s upper-middle-income poverty benchmark. |
India, 2024 | Approximately 33 million people lived below US$3 a day, 216 million below US$4.20 and 1.14 billion below US$8.30. These are three different thresholds, not three estimates of extreme poverty. |
Work and earnings | Working-age adults in extremely poor households were employed at rates about six percentage points below those in nonpoor households. Yet 66% of extremely poor workers worked in agriculture and 79% were self-employed or in related arrangements. |
Climate risk | Of roughly 4.5 billion people exposed to major climate hazards, about 1.5 billion were also highly vulnerable because they lacked means of coping. Most of this highly vulnerable group lived above the extreme poverty line. |
The global 2026 poverty figures are nowcasts, while the India counts above refer to 2024.
Extreme Poverty Has Stalled — and Is Becoming More Concentrated
The global extreme poverty rate has barely moved in recent years despite the much larger gains made over previous decades. More than half of the world’s extremely poor people lived in nine economies in 2024. India was among them because of its large population, not a high extreme poverty rate: the report estimates its rate at about 2%.
The World Bank projects that, under a continuation of recent growth conditions, both the number and share of people in extreme poverty could rise by 2030. Population growth is fastest in places where poverty is already high and economic progress is weakest. By then, 87% of the world’s extremely poor are projected to live in Sub-Saharan Africa, in fragile and conflict-affected settings, or both.
India’s Next Challenge Extends Beyond the Lowest Poverty Line
India’s 33 million people below US$3 a day in 2024 represents substantial progress against extreme poverty. At the US$8.30 benchmark, however, the estimate rises to 1.14 billion, or 30.4% of everyone worldwide below that line. The higher figure does not mean that 1.14 billion Indians are extremely poor. It shows how many remain below a living-standard benchmark used for upper-middle-income economies.
The report’s Global Prosperity Gap tells a related story. It measures the average distance between people’s income or consumption and a US$28-a-day prosperity standard. The global gap fell from 10.5 in 1990 to 4.5 in 2026, but most improvement occurred before 2013. India accounts for 18.5% of the global gap in 2026, reflecting both its population size and the distance many households have yet to travel towards that standard.
More Jobs and Better Earnings Help Different Households
The report challenges the idea that poverty primarily reflects not working. Poor adults are employed almost as often as nonpoor adults, but poor workers tend to work three to four fewer hours a week, earn less and support roughly three times as many dependants as workers in the richest households. From 2003 to 2024, rising earnings per worker—not rising employment rates—accounted for almost all measured growth in welfare per person across the global income distribution.
Both routes nevertheless matter. In a global simulation, raising employment in poor households to 75% of working-age adults reduced the extreme poverty rate from 10.8% to 8.6%. Separate simulations found larger gains from raising poor workers’ education to the nonpoor average, and gains from moving workers into wage or nonagricultural work. These are illustrative scenarios, not forecasts of what a policy would achieve: they hold destination wages fixed and assume no existing worker is displaced.
The two routes also reach different people. Higher earnings benefit the poorest most, many of whom already work. More employment benefits many near-poor households, particularly where working-age women are out of paid work. Yet the report’s evidence across 41 economies shows that a wage job offers a much larger route out of poverty in richer economies than in poorer ones. Improving returns from farming and household enterprises therefore remains important; there is no single job ladder that works everywhere.
Inequality and Climate Shocks Can Weaken Those Gains
The number of economies with a Gini index above 40 fell from 70 in 2000 to 42 in 2024, but about one in five peoplestill lives in a highly unequal economy. Meanwhile, climate risk reaches well beyond households counted as extremely poor. A flood, drought or heat shock can threaten households that have crossed a poverty line but lack savings, services or social protection.
The report argues that ending extreme poverty and limiting emissions are not inherently competing goals: it estimates that growth sufficient to end extreme poverty would add less than 5% to global emissions. Protecting livelihoods from environmental shocks remains essential to making poverty exits last.
What Do the Poverty Lines Measure?
The US$3, US$4.20 and US$8.30 daily lines are international benchmarks expressed in 2021 purchasing power parity, which adjusts for differences in prices across countries. They are not conversions of current US dollars into rupees. Crossing the US$3 line ends measured extreme poverty; it does not establish that a household has reached economic security.
Policy Relevance
India’s low extreme poverty rate changes what policymakers need to track next:
Are earnings improving? Employment counts alone can miss low pay, insufficient hours and movement between forms of work that offer similarly weak returns. Real earnings and productivity—on farms, in household enterprises and in firms—are central measures.
Does women’s work provide a durable income gain? Removing barriers to paid work matters, but the poverty benefit also depends on the hours and returns available to women who enter employment.
Do households remain secure after crossing a poverty line? The gap between India’s US$3 and US$8.30 estimates makes income stability, social protection and exposure to climate and health shocks relevant alongside the extreme poverty rate.
The India estimates also require care in time-series comparisons. This edition incorporates India’s 2022–23 and 2023–24 Household Consumption Expenditure Surveys and removes earlier private-survey observations for 2015–21 because of comparability concerns. The report’s global jobs simulations should likewise inform questions for India, not be presented as India-specific predictions.
Follow the Full Report Here: Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2026: Jobs at the Center of Poverty Eradication