The Census Bureau reports on the SPM compared income-to-poverty‐threshold ratios using the official and the SPM. Comparing the number of people with incomes between 100 and 200 percent of the poverty threshold to the number of people with SPM resources at this level showed big differences. While about 19 percent of people had incomes between 100 and 200 percent of the official thresholds, 31.8 percent of people had SPM resources in this category. Since some have been using 200 percent of the official poverty line as a measure of low income or income inadequacy, many readers interpreted the increase in people between 100 and 200 percent of the SPM thresholds as a surge in the number of “low‐income” families. This paper examined the relationship between the SPM thresholds and a set of thresholds derived from a budget‐based standard to characterize the population below 200 percent of the SPM threshold relative to the family budget needs standard. We found that a much lower percent of the SPM thresholds, 140 percent, identified a similar number of people below the threshold as did a family budget standard.