The World Bank’s International Poverty Line is an extremely low poverty line. Set at $3 per day, it draws attention to the living conditions of the poorest people on the planet.

In the chart above, you can see how the share below this poverty line has declined over the last generation. In the year 2000, 36% of the world’s population lived on less than $3 per day. In 2024, it was 10%.

But is progress against global poverty only happening when measured against such a very low poverty line?

The chart gives the answer. The entire blue line is below the entire dark red line. This tells us that no matter what line you choose, the share below it has declined globally.

Progress against higher poverty lines has been large, too. The share living on less than $5 a day has declined from 57% to 25%, and the share living on less than $10 a day has declined from 74% to 53%.

But on the right-hand side of the chart, we see that most people still live on low incomes: 81% of people in the world live on less than $30 a day, or about $900 a month.