Summary:
- Child poverty in North Carolina remains alarmingly high at 16.6%, with disparities across counties driven in part by policy choices like eliminating the state Earned Income Tax Credit.
- Proven solutions such as tax credits, school nutrition programs, Medicaid expansion, and affordable housing investments exist, but inconsistent funding and policy decisions limit their impact.
- Addressing child poverty requires tackling root causes like low wages, high housing costs, and underfunded public education, all of which are shaped by legislative priorities.
Child poverty is a stain on our pride as a state and a nation. Children are not workers. They are not responsible for their own economic wellbeing. Yet their early years are highly determinative of their future success in life. Childhood poverty impacts brain development and school readiness. Setbacks in both create lifelong reverberations. Fighting child poverty is not a moral imperative, it’s the key to making North Carolina and America more successful, more productive, and more competitive.
North Carolina Has Shamefully High Poverty Rates
Unfortunately, North Carolina’s legislature isn’t doing everything it can to help fight child poverty. Our state has a lot of poor children. The US Census Bureau estimates that 16.6 percent of North Carolina children were living in poverty in 2024. Those numbers are driven in part by the elimination of North Carolina’s own state-level Earned-Income Tax Credit in 2014.
The chart below, which draws on US Census data, shows the child poverty levels in each of our 100 counties.
Map of child poverty rates
High poverty levels cluster in south-central Carolina, sweeping from Richmond (39.1%) to Scotland (39%) and Robeson (36.6%) counties, then working up in a band across the eastern half of the state. Chowan (42%) sets the statewide high water mark, with nearby Tyrell (37.6%), Hyde (37.4%), and Hertford (36.4%) counties not far behind. The lowest child poverty rate is in Graham County (3.6%).
Unsurprisingly, where child poverty rates are high, adult poverty rates tend to be high, too. Watauga, Clay, Orange, Pasquotank, Avery, and Graham counties are the only counties in which the total poverty rate is greater than the child poverty rate, meaning a greater percentage of adults are poor in those counties than children.
Map: Total poverty rates by county
We know how to fight all kinds of poverty.
Programs like the USDA-administered National School Lunch Program reimburse schools for providing low-income children with healthy and nutritious free or reduced-price lunches. The Child Tax Credit (CTC) provides tax refunds worth up to $2,200 per child for qualifying households making less than $200,000 per year. Extremely low-income households may qualify for an extra infusion of cash called the Additional Child Tax Credit (ACTC). Both the CTC and the ACTC provide direct cash subsidies to qualifying parents.
But to tackle child poverty, we really need to take bold action to alleviate adult poverty.
Medicaid expansion created health insurance for hundreds of thousands of low-income North Carolinians, creating affordable access to essential healthcare, including preventative care. Unfortunately, the state legislature included an automatic trigger that would claw back Medicaid funding from North Carolina’s low-income residents if the federal government ever stops paying 90% of the cost of the program. Kicking hundreds of thousands of people off of their healthcare because of an automated provision would be wrong, unfair, and bad for children who depend on their parents for medical care. The state legislature needs to pass a budget that guarantees affordable healthcare to North Carolina residents.
The number one cost for most households is housing, and we face a particularly dire housing challenge in North Carolina. Our state’s Workforce Housing Loan Program helps affordable housing builders close the financial gap between a buildable project and one that can’t come out of the ground. Thanks to the budget stalemate in Raleigh, the fund currently sits empty. An estimated 32,000 children in North Carolina are currently homeless. The cost of housing relative to the median income is at historic highs nationally and here in North Carolina, contributing to a widely felt housing crisis.
Not only are housing costs high, but the schools that shape and prepare our children are chronically underfunded. The Leandro Plan, which ordered the legislature to enact a historic $1.75 billion investment in public schools to provide a sound, basic education to every child in North Carolina, was put on hold under a new Republican court in 2024. That plan would have allocated tens of millions in new spending to districts across North Carolina. Instead, hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated to private school vouchers, taking kids out of public schools and, with them, dollars that could go to supporting those schools. What’s worse, many of the dollars rerouted to private school vouchers are going to families who never enrolled their kids in public school in the first place. Every child has a right to attend public school, but when the state robs public schools to pay for private education, it makes educational opportunities accessible to the wealthy and less attainable for everyone else.
One of the key ingredients to tackling poverty is ensuring that every household has a living wage that keeps up with inflation. The North Carolina minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has been in place since 2009 and has not changed since then. North Carolina’s median wage has grown just 24% in the last 50 years, lagging the national average of 32%. That drops us from 25th in 1970 to 34th in 2023, even as our state’s GDP growth has outpaced the national average, rising 89% over the last thirty years vs. 80% for the nation. We’re a wealthy state. We can afford to pay our workers more.
Poverty is the result of a policy choice. In North Carolina, the legislature’s commitment to a regressive system of income taxation and artificial austerity amounts to subsidies for the wealthy and state-sanctioned inequality. It’s hard to think of something more blatantly unfair than child poverty. The state legislature should be a force for fairness and justice–fighting to ensure that every child in North Carolina has a fair shot at a good life. We’re a long way away from that ideal today.
