Pakistan’s Poverty Rate Has Climbed to 28.9% — and Rural Workers Are Paying the Highest Price

Nearly three in every ten people in Pakistan now live below the poverty line. That is the stark finding of the World Bank’s latest report on the country, and it means around 70 million Pakistanis cannot afford the basics of a decent life.

The World Bank’s Pakistan Poverty and Equity Brief, published in October 2026, puts the national poverty rate at 28.9 percent in 2024-25. Just six years earlier, in 2018-19, it was 21.9 percent. In other words, poverty has risen by seven percentage points in six years — a sharp reversal after two decades of steady progress.

The figures were given fresh attention on Monday, 9 November 2026, when Dawn published a detailed analysis of what the numbers mean for rural Pakistan, where farming still provides a living for more than a third of the country’s workers. The picture it paints is worrying: farm wages have barely moved in three years, machines are rapidly replacing manual labour, and the industries that should be absorbing displaced workers are not creating enough jobs.

This article explains what the World Bank found, why poverty is rising again, who is being hit hardest, and what the government says it plans to do about it.

The headline numbers: poverty is up, and by a lot

The World Bank measures poverty in Pakistan against the government’s own national poverty line: Rs8,484 per adult per month. Anyone living on less than that is counted as poor.

On that measure, the story of the last decade has two very different halves:

• In 2013-14, the poverty rate was 29.5 percent.
• By 2015-16, it had fallen to 24.3 percent.
• By 2018-19, it had fallen further to 21.9 percent.
• By 2024-25, it had climbed back to 28.9 percent.

So Pakistan spent years pulling people out of poverty, then lost most of those gains in just six years. Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal has publicly acknowledged the 28.9 percent figure, telling the Express Tribune that poverty had risen and that the government was considering changing how it measures poverty to capture the effects of climate shocks and lost opportunities.

The wider picture is even starker. The World Bank’s brief also reports that 47.9 percent of Pakistan’s population — almost one person in two — lives below the Bank’s international poverty line of $4.20 a day for lower-middle-income countries. That is a different yardstick from the national line, but it shows how many people live close to the edge, even if they are not counted as poor under the national measure.

Around 70 million Pakistanis are now living below the national poverty line, according to the World Bank’s country overview cited by several Pakistani news outlets.

Why did poverty rise again?

The World Bank points to a chain of shocks that hit Pakistan one after another.

First came COVID-19, which shut down businesses, cut incomes and pushed many families into debt. Then came the devastating floods of 2022, which destroyed homes, crops and livestock across Sindh, Balochistan and southern Punjab. Then came the economic crisis: inflation hit 29.2 percent in the 2022-23 financial year and 23.4 percent the year after, while real incomes — what people’s money could actually buy — fell.

On top of that, the economy has barely been growing fast enough to keep up with the population. Growth dipped to just 2 percent in the April-June quarter of 2026, according to the Express Tribune — lower than the population growth rate of 2.6 percent. When the economy grows more slowly than the population, average incomes shrink, and poverty rises.

Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal summed up the causes in a single sentence: “The political instability, policy discontinuity, economic crises and climate shocks reversed development gains.” He has also warned that Pakistan risks stabilising at a “structurally low rate of economic growth” — growing, but too slowly to lift people out of poverty.

Inequality has widened at the same time. The Gini coefficient, a standard measure of income inequality, rose from 28.4 to 32.7 between the two survey periods, meaning the gap between rich and poor grew while poverty was rising.

The rural crisis: farming employs a third of Pakistan, but pays less and less

The most alarming part of the story is in the countryside. Agriculture is still the main source of work for rural Pakistan. It provides jobs — self-employment and wage work — to 35.1 percent of the national labour force. But it contributes only 23.44 percent of GDP. That gap tells you something important: farm work produces relatively little value per worker, so farm workers earn relatively little.

And their situation is getting worse, according to the analysis published in Dawn on 9 November by development professional Khalid Wattoo and Dr Waqar Ahmad, a former associate professor at the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad.

Several pressures are squeezing farm families at once:

• Subsidies and support prices have been withdrawn. Government support for crops has been cut back, leaving farmers more exposed to market swings.
• Input costs have soared. Electricity, fertiliser, pesticide and diesel have all become more expensive, while the prices farmers receive for their crops have stayed low.
• Trade routes have been disrupted. The closure of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and the war in Iran have hurt farm trade and pushed up costs.
• Climate change is making farming less predictable. Erratic rainfall means sowing and harvesting must be done in narrow windows — which is one reason farmers are turning to machines.

The result: the wages of farm workers — daily wagers, seasonal labourers and tenured workers — have remained stagnant in many areas over the past three years, despite record-high inflation. In real terms, their pay has fallen sharply.

Machines are replacing workers — and there is nowhere else to go

The deepest change, the Dawn analysis argues, is mechanisation. Machines are rapidly taking over the work that once employed millions of farm labourers.

Wheat, Pakistan’s largest crop, is now mostly harvested by combine harvesters. Sales of the old wheat threshers — machines that needed a large team of workers to operate — are falling as combines replace them.

Rice, the country’s second-largest crop and a source of seasonal work for millions, is changing even faster. Self-propelled transplanters are replacing workers who used to plant rice seedlings by hand. One imported used transplanter costs around Rs2.5 million, can plant 10 acres a day, and replaces more than 60 workers. On the harvesting side, combine and half-feed harvesters have almost entirely displaced manual labour in the main rice-growing areas.

Maize, the fourth-largest crop, is going the same way, with tractor-driven planters and self-propelled harvesters replacing labour-intensive manual work. Even potato sorting is being mechanised: sales of potato graders, which cut the manual labour needed for sorting by 80 percent, continue to rise.

Farmers are not adopting machines out of choice alone. Mechanisation has become almost unavoidable, for three reasons. First, unpredictable weather forces them to finish sowing and harvesting quickly, and only machines can do that. Second, with profit margins squeezed by high costs and low crop prices, machines are often cheaper than hiring workers. Third, machines can do some jobs better — manual labourers, for example, rarely achieve the recommended rice plant density of 80,000 hills per acre, while mechanical transplanters do.

But the human cost is real. In countries going through this kind of change, workers displaced from farms usually find jobs in factories and services. Pakistan’s problem is that its industry is not growing fast enough to absorb them. The Dawn analysis points to uncompetitive energy prices, heavy taxation and high interest rates as reasons industry is failing to create enough jobs. Most displaced farm workers are illiterate or school dropouts, which makes it even harder for them to move into other work.

The result is a growing risk of unemployment or underemployment in rural areas — people who have work, but not enough of it, or not enough pay from it.

The jobs gap: one in six new workers cannot find work

The problem is not limited to farms. The World Bank’s October 2026 Pakistan Development Update found that one in every six people who entered Pakistan’s labour market since 2018 has remained without employment. The unemployment rate stood at 7 percent in 2024, with women and young people making up a disproportionately large share of those without jobs.

This matters enormously because Pakistan has a very young population: 66 percent of Pakistanis are under 30, and most of them live in rural areas. Every year, millions of young people enter the workforce. If the economy cannot create jobs for them, poverty will keep rising — and, as the Dawn analysis warns, it could fuel social instability.

The World Bank expects the economy to grow by 3.8 percent in the 2026-27 financial year, and 4.2 percent the year after. That would be an improvement, but economists say Pakistan needs growth well above the population growth rate simply to create enough jobs, absorb new workers and reduce poverty.

Who is hit hardest? Balochistan, and the poorest districts

Poverty is not spread evenly across Pakistan. The World Bank’s provincial estimates for 2024-25 show a sharp divide:

• Punjab: 23.3 percent
• Sindh: 32.6 percent
• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: 35.3 percent
• Balochistan: 47 percent

Almost half the population of Balochistan lives below the poverty line — roughly double the rate in Punjab.

The World Bank has also highlighted Pakistan’s weight in the region. In its October 2026 economic update for the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan region, the Bank reported that about 48 percent of the people living in extreme poverty across that whole region live in Pakistan. To be clear, that does not mean 48 percent of Pakistanis are extremely poor. It means that of all the extremely poor people in that group of countries, nearly half are in Pakistan — a reflection of both Pakistan’s large population and its high poverty rate.

The government’s own poverty mapping tells a similar story. The planning ministry’s work on multidimensional poverty — which looks at health, education and living standards, not just income — identified Pakistan’s 20 poorest districts. Eleven are in Balochistan, five in Sindh, three in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and only one in Punjab.

What is the government doing about it?

The government has acknowledged the problem and is taking two steps that could matter.

First, it is working with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) at the University of Oxford to revise how Pakistan measures poverty. The current Multidimensional Poverty Index is based on health, education and living standards. The new version could add demographic pressure, climate shocks and new barriers to opportunity — such as digital exclusion, youth deprivation, gender inequality, nutrition and stunting. The updated measurement exercise will draw on the ongoing Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey 2026-27.

Second, the government may publish poverty figures broken down by political constituency, using data from the 2023 population census. The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics has already prepared constituency-wise poverty analysis, but the government has not yet decided whether to make it public, because of what officials call its “far-reaching implications”. The planning minister has said such analysis should first be done as a pilot project, as evidence for targeting public investment — not as a scorecard for elected representatives.

But the planning minister has also been unusually frank about the scale of the challenge. He recently wrote to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif urging a reset of economic policies, describing the current phase of economic stabilisation as “borrowed and stunted”. And he has pointed to a striking fact about public investment: the federal development programme stood at Rs1 trillion in 2017-18, about 19.6 percent of the federal budget and 2.5 percent of GDP. In 2026-27, it is still about Rs1 trillion — almost unchanged in nominal terms, despite years of population growth, inflation and rising needs. Had the 2017-18 share of the budget been maintained, the development programme would now be worth more than Rs3 trillion.

He warned that shrinking public investment has serious consequences for education, healthcare, water security, infrastructure, skills and economic opportunities — especially in disadvantaged regions.

What needs to change?

The Dawn analysis ends with a clear warning and a clear prescription. Pakistan needs a comprehensive strategy to create non-farm jobs in rural areas, expand the livestock sector, and scale up agro-processing — turning raw farm produce into packaged goods closer to where it is grown. Without timely action, it argues, millions of poor farm workers will bear the high social cost of technological progress: widespread unemployment and deepening rural poverty.

The broader lesson of the World Bank’s figures is that economic stability alone is not enough. Inflation has come down from its peak, and growth is expected to pick up. But unless that growth creates jobs — especially for young people and rural workers — poverty will stay high, and the gains of the past two decades will remain lost.

For 70 million Pakistanis, that is not an abstract debate about statistics. It is the difference between affording food, school and medicine, or going without.

Frequently asked questions

What is Pakistan’s poverty rate now?

According to the World Bank’s Pakistan Poverty and Equity Brief (October 2026), the national poverty rate was 28.9 percent in 2024-25, up from 21.9 percent in 2018-19. Around 70 million Pakistanis live below the national poverty line.

What is the poverty line in Pakistan?

The national poverty line used by the government of Pakistan is Rs8,484 per adult per month. Anyone living on less than that is counted as poor. The World Bank also reports that 47.9 percent of Pakistanis live below its $4.20-a-day line for lower-middle-income countries.

Why has poverty increased in Pakistan?

The World Bank attributes the rise to COVID-19, the 2022 floods, very high inflation (29.2 percent in 2022-23 and 23.4 percent in 2023-24), falling real incomes, and economic growth too slow to keep up with population growth. In rural areas, mechanisation is also displacing farm workers faster than other sectors can absorb them.

Which province has the highest poverty in Pakistan?

Balochistan, where about 47 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, followed by Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (35.3 percent), Sindh (32.6 percent) and Punjab (23.3 percent).

How many people in Pakistan live in poverty?

Around 70 million Pakistanis live below the national poverty line, according to the World Bank’s October 2026 figures.

Sources

• Dawn, “The new face of rural poverty in Pakistan”, 9 November 2026: https://www.dawn.com/news/print/2043209
• The Express Tribune, “Poverty climbs back to 28.9%”, 29 October 2026: https://tribune.com.pk/story/2637469/poverty-climbs-back-to-289
• The Tribune International, “Urran Pakistan: 70 million Pakistanis in poverty”, 1 November 2026: https://thetribuneinternational.com/urran-pakistan-70million-pakistanis-in-poverty-is-this-the-asian-tiger-we-have-been-ppromised/
• ProPakistani, “Pakistan’s Poverty Rate Jumps to 29% as Job Creation Fails to Keep Pace”, 22 October 2026: https://propakistani.pk/2026/10/22/pakistans-poverty-rate-jumps-to-29-as-job-creation-fails-to-keep-pace/
• Paradigm Shift, “Pakistan’s 48% Poverty Rate: The World Bank Report”, 23 October 2026: https://www.paradigmshift.com.pk/world-banks-poverty-report/

This article is for general information and education only. It is not legal or financial advice.