Until 2024, the official measurement of poverty in Mexico, including working poverty and income lines, was under CONEVAL (the National Council for the Evaluation of Social Development Policy). The autonomous entity in Mexico, responsible for measuring poverty and evaluating social policies, was shut down by the Mexican Government.
In 2025, this responsibility was transferred to INEGI (National Council for Statistics and Geography), which measures poverty in Mexico using a multidimensional approach, considering both economic well-being and social deprivations. This involves assessing income levels against a poverty line and evaluating individuals’ social deprivations in areas like education, health, and housing.
One of the points they take into consideration is multidimensional poverty, in which an individual is considered poor if they have an income below the cost of the basic food basket.
Mexico Comovamos (https://mexicocomovamos.mx/what-we-do/) is a growing collective of social scientists, mainly economists, who formed a nonprofit organization whose objective is to define goals for growth and job creation through the timely monitoring of various economic indicators. They use a traffic light system to measure this, as in green for good, yellow for in danger, and red for high poverty.
Economic traffic lights are indicators selected by experts. Due to their importance and impact on economic growth and job creation, they allow for a diagnosis of Mexico’s progress. They are quantifiable and objective targets, which vary periodically and are classified as national, state, and sectoral.
If the proportion of the population in working poverty is greater than 36%, the “traffic light” will be red.
In this range, the states with the lowest rate of population living in working poverty in the first quarter of 2025 are Baja California Sur (12.8%) and Quintana Roo (18.7%), followed by Colima with 19.7%, Baja California with 20.1% and Mexico City with 21.6%.
Nationally, 33.9% of the population will be living in working poverty in the first quarter of 2025, the lowest in the history of the organization’s indicator, based on data from 2005. This represents a 1.9% year-over-year reduction; approximately 44.2 million Mexicans cannot afford to buy food for all household members with their earned income.
For the first time since 2008, the Economic Traffic Light for working poverty for women improved to yellow, with 35.9%, although it maintains a 4.2% gap compared to men, with 31.7%. The data reveal that nationwide, 113 women are living in working poverty for every 100 men, a disparity that is repeated across all 32 states.