Seniors’ poverty rate seen rising to 7.0%, StatCan says

The share of Canadian seniors living in poverty is projected to have jumped to 7.0 per cent in 2025 from 5.4 per cent a year earlier, Statistics Canada said Nov. 4 in its first estimate for the year, even as the overall national rate barely moved.

The agency’s provisional poverty estimates put the national rate for 2025 at 11.2 per cent, essentially unchanged from the official 11.0 per cent for 2024. That is roughly 4.6 million people below the poverty line.

Behind the flat national figure, the numbers moved in opposite directions. Using the agency’s table of counts, Canada News Media calculated that the number of seniors aged 65 and older in poverty rose to about 554,000 from about 410,000, an increase of roughly 144,000 people, or 35 per cent. The national total rose by about 90,000, to 4.57 million from 4.48 million. That means the number of Canadians under 65 in poverty fell by roughly 54,000.

The seniors’ increase is also outside the statistical noise. The agency’s table of rates gives a range of 6.7 to 7.3 per cent for seniors in 2025 and 5.1 to 5.7 per cent for 2024, so the two ranges do not overlap. Statistics Canada said the rate for people aged 18 to 64 (12.4 per cent) and for children (11.4 per cent) was projected to be relatively unchanged. Unattached individuals, people who live alone or with unrelated roommates, remained the group at greatest risk at 26.2 per cent, compared with 8.0 per cent for people living in families.

Quebec was the one province the agency flagged for a rise. Its provisional rate is 8.5 per cent, up from 7.0 per cent in 2024, and the ranges (7.9 to 9.1 per cent for 2025, 6.6 to 7.4 per cent for 2024) also do not overlap. By our calculation, Quebec had about 759,000 people in poverty in 2025, up from about 627,000, a gain of about 132,000. That is more than the national increase, which implies the rest of the country combined had about 42,000 fewer people in poverty. Statistics Canada said the other provinces showed little change. British Columbia (13.0 per cent) and Ontario (12.1 per cent) still have the highest provisional rates, although Quebec’s rate remains the lowest in the country.

The release does not say why the seniors’ rate rose. Statistics Canada said the lowest-income households, the bottom 20 per cent, saw their average disposable income grow 2.6 per cent in 2025, slower than the 3.8 per cent for all households, but still ahead of 2025 average inflation of 2.1 per cent. The agency said the estimate is consistent with the other economic indicators available for 2025.

For retirees, the question is how far fixed incomes stretch. Old Age Security payments were raised 1.4 per cent for the October to December quarter, and some provinces are adding one-time help, such as the cheques of $100 to $500 Newfoundland and Labrador seniors will get in December. For the wider jobs picture, see our earlier reports on flat economic output and shrinking payrolls and on public-sector job losses. Statistics Canada did not link the poverty figures to any labour-market cause.

The figures are provisional. They are built from a mix of tax files from 2024 and 2025, and the official 2025 poverty rates, which will also include the territories, are not due until spring 2027. The estimates cover the provinces only. Poverty is measured with the Market Basket Measure, which compares a family’s disposable income with the cost of a modest basket of food, clothing, shelter, transportation and other necessities in its region.

How we did this: we used the Statistics Canada Daily release of Nov. 4, 2026, and its tables 1 and 2, which publish both the estimates and the confidence intervals. Differences, percentage changes and the under-65 and rest-of-Canada figures are our own subtraction from the published counts, which are rounded, so they are approximate. We treated a change as clear only when the published ranges do not overlap.

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