The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) was designed to more fully account for the resources that individuals have to meet their basic needs. As such, unlike the official poverty measure, the SPM adds the value of in-kind benefits and deducts necessary expenses from total resources; these deductions include state and federal income taxes, child support paid, medical expenses, and work-related expenses such as commuting and child-care costs. Since the first estimates of the SPM were released for 2010 through 2015, deductions for work-related expenses (excluding childcare) were derived from data collected in the 2008 Panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). In March 2017, the redesigned 2014 SIPP Panel was released and used to update the work-expense deduction when calculating the SPM for 2016.

This paper compares work-related expenses reported in the redesigned 2014 SIPP Panel to those from the previous 2008 Panel, and evaluates how SPM estimates for 2015 vary across demographic groups when calculating resource deductions based on the redesigned panel. This paper finds that 2015 median weekly work-related expenses increase from $40.22, using wave 10 of the 2008 Panel, to $47.17 using wave 1 of the 2014 Panel.2 This increase in work expenses leads to a 0.3 percentage point increase in the SPM rate for 2015.

Reflects update to earlier draft published on September 07, 2017.