Global extreme poverty falls to 9.8% in 2026

The World Bank’s September 2026 update estimates that global extreme poverty will fall to 9.8% in 2026, down from 10.1% recorded in 2024. This is a marginal but measurable decline, part of a long-term trajectory toward reducing the share of the world’s population living with extremely limited resources.

According to the estimates, those benefiting still represent an enormous population in absolute terms: over 824 million people, roughly a tenth of the world’s population, were living in extreme poverty in 2024, the baseline from which the downward projection for 2026 starts. The improvement, however, is not geographically uniform: extreme poverty rates have fallen below 5% in every region of the world except two, Sub-Saharan Africa and the region comprising the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the rate is instead rising.

This geographic imbalance is the element most worth keeping in mind when reading the aggregate figure: a global decline to 9.8% coexists with a worsening situation in some of the planet’s already poorest areas, a sign that the average progress conceals opposite trajectories depending on the region considered.

The data comes from the World Bank’s Poverty and Inequality Platform, published in the September 2026 update. This is an institutional source that collects and processes data from national surveys on household income and consumption worldwide. It should be noted that the news currently comes from a single source available in the material consulted; no further independent confirmations of the 2026 projections are currently available, which remain, as stated, an estimate and not a final, definitive figure.

The picture that emerges nonetheless remains clear in its numerical terms: from just under a tenth of the world’s population in extreme poverty in 2024, the projection indicates a reduction of three-tenths of a percentage point by 2026, with the exception of two regions where the trend is instead the opposite.