(CNN) — Median US household income was $68,700 in 2019, the highest since 1967, the first year records were kept, according to inflation-adjusted data released by the Census Bureau Tuesday.
That’s up 6.8% from the year before.
The poverty rate fell to 10.5% last year, the lowest since 1959, Census said. That’s down about 1.3 percentage points in 2018. Some 34 million were in poverty, 4.2 million fewer than the year before.
All these gains, however, were upended by the coronavirus pandemic this year, which resulted in the steepest decline in employment on record. While millions of jobs have come back, some 13.6 million Americans remained unemployed in August.
The Census Bureau indicated that the pandemic affected its collection of data this year.
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