Upcoming changes to Northern Ireland’s poverty and income inequality statistics

Date published: 19 March 2026

What is changing?

Poverty statistics in Northern Ireland and across the United Kingdom are based on data from the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) Family Resources Survey (FRS). The survey has been the main source of data for household income and poverty measurement for Great Britain since 1994/95 and NI since 2002/03.

Over recent years, DWP has been undertaking a major FRS transformation programme to improve the quality, coherence and completeness of income-based poverty statistics, with a central focus on integrating administrative data with survey responses.

Three substantial transformation components are being implemented:

1. Benefit linkage - replacing survey reported benefit receipt with administrative records to improve accuracy and reduce historical underreporting.
2. Earnings linkage - replacing survey reported earnings with administrative earnings data to improve accuracy and address underreporting.
3. A new grossing regime - updating the way the statistics are scaled to population totals (known as grossing).  This will incorporate population data from the 2021 Census and new control totals for the main benefits to ensure the statistics better account for benefit receipt across the population.

Benefit linkage will be incorporated directly into 2026 outputs replacing survey data, with earnings linkage and the updated grossing regime planned to follow in the coming years.

Why are these changes happening?

For many years the FRS has underreported benefit receipt, due to, respondents not reporting that they receive a benefit, respondents understating the amount of benefit received, and survey sampling not fully capturing all benefit recipients.

This undercount means household income has been consistently understated, especially for lower income households.

This transformation work will reduce income underreporting leading to an improvement in the quality, coherence and completeness of income-based poverty statistics. 

What does this mean for NI publications?

The incorporation of benefit linkage to the FRS will result in revisions to previously published statistics on poverty and income. 

As a result, the Department for Communities (DfC) will publish the next:

• NI Poverty & Income Inequality Report – 24/25 (26 March 2026) and
• NI Family Resources Survey Report -24/25 (summer 2026) 

as Official Statistics in Development, signalling to users that the methodology is undergoing major changes, and that further revisions are expected in coming years.

For NI, figures will be revised back to 2021/22. This is the earliest year where NI FRS data can be consistently linked to administrative records.

Updating the absolute poverty measure

Absolute poverty measures a household’s income against an anchor year, currently 2010/11, a year which cannot be linked to administrative data. To remain relevant the anchor year must change. After review DWP have decided to update the anchor year to 2024/25, bringing the measure as up to date as possible. This will materially change published absolute poverty levels. NI will follow this change, so our figures remain comparable with the rest of the UK.

Supporting users through the change

We are committed to helping users understand and adapt to these changes.  As such, our publications will clearly indicate where the series break occurs and what figures remain comparable over time. Comparative data will also be available to show the impact of benefit linkage on poverty rates.

While these developments represent essential modernisation, the scale and ongoing nature of the changes introduce uncertainty, and this transition will last for a number of years. In light of this we have chosen to temporarily suspend the accredited official statistics designation for our poverty and income publications. Instead, we will release these publications as Official Statistics in Development. This is a transparent signal to our users that while these figures remain valuable, the ongoing updates to data linkage, grossing and the absolute poverty measure mean they should be interpreted with extra care, particularly for long‑term comparisons.

This temporary de-designation will allow us to further investigate the NI specific impacts and aim to produce a revised, consistent back series once all transformation components are implemented.

Find out more

More detail will be available in upcoming methodological papers and the DWP release strategy.
For questions, please contact Analytics Division.