Poverty rates by London borough (2022/23)
Last updated: September 2024
Next estimated update: September 2025
What’s this indicator?
This indicator shows the percentage of people living in poverty in each London borough. View the data mapped further down the page.
The poverty rates for London boroughs presented here pool together five years of survey data for all financial years between 2017/18 and 2022/23, excluding 2020/21 as data quality in this year was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of multiple years of data means that the full impacts of the pandemic will not be seen in these results.
Even when pulling together six survey years, the sample sizes for individual boroughs remain uneven and, for some boroughs, small. This means that although we present our best estimates of poverty for each borough, there is some uncertainty around the precise estimates. For the technical-minded, the downloadable data includes the 95% confidence intervals, which demonstrate the scale of uncertainty for each borough.
Even with this degree of uncertainty, we can still say plenty about the variation in poverty rates across London boroughs. To do this in a statistically robust way, we have split boroughs into three groups - those whose poverty rates are close to the London average and those above and below the London average.
What does it tell us?
What we find is that Camden, Westminster, Tower Hamlets, Newham, Brent, Enfield, Ealing, Redbridge, Wandsworth, and Barking and Dagenham all have poverty rates higher than the London average, while poverty rates in Sutton, Croydon, Harrow, Kingston upon Thames, Southwark, Islington, Bexley, Havering, Hammersmith and Fulham, Bromley, Merton, Richmond upon Thames are lower than the London average.
Map of poverty rates by borough
Poverty rate (2022/23)
Poverty and employment
In every borough at least half (50%) of the individuals in poverty were living in working households - that is a household where at least one member was in employment. In just over half of the London boroughs at least 70% of people in poverty lived in working households, with Greenwich seeing the largest proportion - 84% of its approximately 38,000 in-poverty residents lived in working households. On average in London over these 5 years, 68% of the 2.3m people in poverty lived in households where at least one member was in employment.
Proportion of people in poverty in working and non-working families by London borough (2022/23)
Each borough also has different dimensions to consider when looking at inequality. Explore our heatmap to see how London boroughs compare across a range of indicators – from child poverty levels to income deprivation.
Want to know more?
If you want to explore this data in more depth, check the 'data source and notes' button on the above charts. This will tell you where the data comes from, where you may be able to dig deeper.