Statistics

Upcoming changes to poverty and inequality statistics

December 17, 2025 by Office of the Chief Statistician No Comments | Category Social Justice

Important updates to how our poverty statistics are produced are set to take effect in the March 2026 release.  This blog outlines why this is happening and what we will do to help our users understand the changes.

Why are these changes happening?

Poverty statistics in Scotland are based on data from the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) Family Resources Survey (FRS). This survey has been the main source of data for household income and poverty measurement with data going back to the financial year 1994-95.

Now, after years of development, DWP is linking FRS responses with administrative records on a number of benefits.   This will reduce the underreporting of benefit income currently seen in the FRS data, as well as eventually reducing the burden for survey respondents.  The result of the change will mean revisions to the rates of poverty.

The development means:

• Some survey responses about benefit income will be replaced with administrative data on benefits payments.
• Households that didn’t report benefit income in the survey but are found in administrative records will now also be included, therefore improving coverage.
• Because FRS respondents have given consent to their information being linked since 2017, DWP aim to revise the statistics back to financial year 2018-19.

While data from devolved Scottish social security benefits will not be linked in the next release, DWP will take steps to make Scotland-specific disability and carers benefits marry up more closely to known caseloads.  This is as well as retaining the agreed imputation methodology for the Scottish Child Payment. It is intended that administrative data from Scottish benefits will be linked from the 2027 publication onward.

Re-basing absolute poverty

Absolute poverty measures a household’s income against an inflation-adjusted UK median income in a reference year, currently 2010-11.  Due to the structural break introduced by the data linkage, DWP have reviewed and will move the reference year from 2010-11 to the latest year for which data will be available (2024-25).  We will mirror this change in our Poverty and Income Inequality in Scotland publication, so statistics are comparable to the rest of the UK.

For the purposes of the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017, 2010-11 remains the base year for absolute poverty.  This will provide a consistent time-series to assess against the corresponding statutory target, and will be published alongside the main publication.

Supporting users through the change

We are committed to helping users understand and adapt to these changes.  As such, charts and tables will clearly indicate where the series break occurs.  Comparative data will also be available to show the impact of the linkage and rebasing on poverty rates.

Further changes ahead of the 2027 publication

DWP plan for further changes to poverty and inequality statistics in 2027, when the way the statistics are scaled to population totals (known as grossing) is updated.  This update will incorporate the latest census population data and may result in further revisions to the poverty rates. This will include the incorporation of new control totals for the main DWP benefits, as planned, to ensure the statistics better account for benefit receipt across the population.

For further details, please refer to the DWP release strategy

Changes to the hosting of the poverty publication

In addition to the changes outlined above, in March 2026, we will move our publication from data.gov.scot to the Scottish Government website.  Users may notice some changes to the look and feel of the publication that will make it consistent to other Scottish Government statistical publications.

The range of statistics available will remain unchanged and users will be able to access the information they are accustomed to.  Full signposting will be available within the publication to aid clarity.

For any queries on the content of this blog, please contact us at social-justice-analysis@gov.scot.

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