What percentage of Walmart employees live below the federal poverty line?
Executive summary
Available reporting does not give a single, authoritative percentage of Walmart employees who live below the federal poverty line; instead, research and news coverage document high numbers of Walmart workers relying on public benefits (e.g., 14,500 on SNAP and 10,350 on Medicaid in nine states for Walmart alone) and long-standing critiques that many employees earn poverty-level wages [1] [2] [3]. Studies and advocacy groups say Walmart’s low wages and the firm’s effects on local incomes raise poverty, with academic work estimating that Walmart openings are associated with an ~8% increase in local poverty rates [4] [5].
1. No single percentage in the record — what the sources actually report
There is no clear answer in these sources that states “X% of Walmart employees live below the federal poverty line.” Instead, investigations and advocacy reporting emphasize the scale of dependence on government programs: a Washington Post breakdown cited in Jacobin and other outlets found Walmart had 14,500 employees on SNAP and 10,350 on Medicaid across nine states examined [1]. The Government Accountability Office and related reporting place Walmart among the top employers whose workers use federal benefits, but they do not translate that to a company-wide poverty-rate percentage [6] [2].
2. Public‑program dependence is the most commonly cited metric
Because employer pay and household poverty are complicated to measure directly, journalists and researchers often report counts of workers enrolled in SNAP, Medicaid or other programs. The Jacobin summary of the Washington Post analysis gives those headline figures (14,500 on SNAP; 10,350 on Medicaid) for nine states, and the UN and GAO inquiries repeatedly flagged Walmart as a top employer of program beneficiaries in the sampled states [1] [2] [6]. Those program-enrollment counts are suggestive of low incomes but are not the same as a percentage of all Walmart employees below the federal poverty line.
3. Academic work measures broader local effects, not employee poverty share
Scholars studying Walmart’s economic footprint measure impacts on community poverty and wages rather than the share of the firm’s workers under the poverty line. Parolin and co‑authors (reported in The Atlantic and Sheila Kennedy’s writeup) find that the introduction of Walmart stores is associated with about an 8% increase in local poverty rates relative to comparable places without a Walmart — a community-level effect, not a direct employee-poverty percentage [4] [5]. The working paper on Walmart openings referenced in the search results underlines this focus on local monopsony power and poverty, but the document itself is not summarized to yield a company-wide worker poverty rate in these sources [7].
4. Wage benchmarks and company disclosures give context but not a poverty percentage
Reporting documents Walmart’s average hourly pay at various times (for example, a 2019 Washington Post story cited a $14.26 full‑time hourly average then) and company statements about raising wages and training investments appear elsewhere in corporate communications [3] [8]. Oxfam, Salon and Good coverage place Walmart’s U.S. workforce around 1.5–1.6 million and emphasize that many of those jobs pay below “living wage” estimates — again contextual evidence but not a direct poverty-line percentage [9] [10] [11].
5. Competing perspectives and methodological limits
Advocates and some academics present Walmart as a major driver of working poverty and taxpayer‑subsidized labor costs; the UN rapporteur and Oxfam have publicly criticized the company for low pay and reliance on public benefits [2] [10]. Walmart and some economists argue that lower prices and employment gains from big-box retail benefit consumers and that company‑level wage averages have risen over time [8]. The sources note method limits: community-level studies cannot fully rule out that Walmart locates in already-troubled places, and program-enrollment counts in selected states cannot be extrapolated to all employees nationwide without additional data [4] [6].
6. What’s missing and how to get a definitive number
Available sources do not provide a definitive, company-wide percentage of Walmart employees living below the federal poverty line; that figure would require a nationwide, employer‑level analysis linking household income and household composition to the federal poverty thresholds. The GAO, state SNAP/Medicaid agency lists, academic working papers and company payroll disclosures are the closest available inputs in current reporting, but none gives the single percentage the question asks for [6] [7] [3].
7. Bottom line for readers
Reporting and research converge on this: a significant number of Walmart workers rely on public assistance and many earn wages observers call “poverty‑level,” and academic work finds Walmart openings correlate with higher local poverty (~8% increase). But the precise share of all Walmart employees who live below the federal poverty line is not stated in these sources and remains uncalculated in the cited reporting [1] [4] [5] [6].