Poverty rates by London borough (2023/24)
Last updated: June 2025
Next estimated update: June 2026
What’s this indicator?
This indicator shows the percentage of people living in poverty in each London borough.
The poverty rates for London boroughs presented here pool together five years of survey data for all financial years between 2018/19 and 2023/24, 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 five 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, Hounslow, Redbridge, Brent, Barking and Dagenham, Enfield, and Ealing all have poverty rates higher than the London average, while poverty rates in Bromley, Richmond upon Thames, Merton, Sutton, Havering, Islington, Bexley, Southwark, Hillingdon and Croydon are lower than the London average.
We explore this data in more depth on our blog here.
Map of poverty rates by borough
Poverty rate (2023/24)
Working poverty by London borough
Proportion of people in poverty in working and non-working families by London borough (2023/24)
In all but six boroughs 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 under half of the London boroughs at least 70% of people in poverty lived in working households, with Sutton seeing the largest proportion - 100% of its approximately 48,000 in-poverty residents lived in working households.
On average in London over these 5 years, 66% of the 2.4m people in poverty lived in households where at least one member was in employment.
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.