About 250,000 San Antonio Residents Live in Poverty, the City's 2026 Status of Poverty Report Finds
The Department of Human Services' 2026 report puts the city's poverty rate at roughly 17.1 percent, with 32 percent of census tracts at high poverty rates — many of them high-poverty for decades — and housing costs rising faster than incomes.
About 250,000 San Antonio residents — roughly 17.1 percent of the city — live in poverty, according to the city's 2026 Status of Poverty report, presented by the Department of Human Services on Oct. 22 and read this run. Laura Serrano, the department's chief of social demography, walked the committee through the methodology and findings, built on American Community Survey five-year estimates and other data series.
The concentration is the story as much as the headline number: 32 percent of the city's census tracts have high poverty rates, and many tracts identified as high-poverty have remained so for decades, the presentation said. The report also tracks rising housing cost burdens — housing costs outpacing income gains — and an ALICE population (asset limited, income constrained, employed) that expands the set of households vulnerable to a financial shock beyond the poverty line itself.
Local television coverage of the same report, read this run, put the trend plainly: a poverty rate of about 17 percent that has not significantly improved over the past decade, with child poverty declining while poverty among older adults has increased. For a city where nearly one resident in five lives below the line, the report is the baseline every housing, transit and workforce debate at City Hall now starts from.
