State of Working Vermont 2025

Many Vermonters’ incomes fall below the basic needs standard established by the state. The majority of one-adult households with children have income under the threshold, as well as nearly half of single adults without kids. In households with children where only one of the adults is working, half have income below the basic needs amount. Households with two earners fare better—a quarter of them are below the threshold. Families with kids have higher expenses, and households with more kids have more costs. Some households may be accessing other sources of financial support or sharing housing or expenses to make their budgets work. Still, many families are struggling to cover growing costs. The mismatch between income and need must be addressed.

The official poverty rate for Vermonters overall was 9.0 percent in 2024, the third-lowest rate in the country and below the national rate of 12.1 percent. Those between 18 and 34 were more likely to live in poverty than other age groups. Nearly 12,000 Vermont seniors faced poverty, as well as 10,000 children.

In 2022, the top 10 percent of Vermonters held 45 percent of the total income in the state, leaving just 55 percent for the remaining 90 percent. The last time the top 10 percent held a comparable share was the 1930s, during the Great Depression and leading up to World War II. But for the last 50 years, the richest have accrued an increasing share of income.

In any given month, over 60,000 Vermonters rely on benefits from the federal Supplementary Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP—also known as 3SquaresVT. This includes more than 18,000 children. All participants suffered delays in benefits in November 2025 because of the federal government shutdown. But the budget reconciliation act passed by Congress in July imposes significant cuts to SNAP over the long term. Federal policymakers are shifting costs to the states, eliminating numerous groups of people from eligibility, and imposing stricter work requirements for participation. Estimates vary, but anywhere from 16,000 to 40,000 Vermonters—as many as two-thirds of current recipients—risk losing some or all of their 3SquaresVT food assistance.

Since 2020, homelessess has risen sharply. A one-day point-in-time count last January found nearly 3,500 people in Vermont without permanent housing, more than triple the number in 2019, and one of the highest rates of homelessness of any state. And January is when the state makes the most shelter beds available; in warmer weather many more homeless Vermonters are unsheltered.  Recent federal actions are exacerbating the problem, including efforts to criminalize unsheltered homelessness, potential cuts to homelessness assistance programs, and the elimination of access to housing vouchers for at least 131 Vermont households in 2025, with larger possible losses in 2026.

The median value of primary homes in Vermont, as reported by the U.S. Census, jumped by over $119,000 between 2019 and 2024, from $233,200 to $352,800. That’s much larger growth than in the prior five years, when the increase was $18,000. The share of homes worth more than $300,000 in the state went from one-third in 2019 to nearly 60 percent in 2024. Primary homes for sale have followed suit. The median sale price increased by 55 percent over the period.

Meanwhile, household income has grown just 15 percent since 2019, failing to keep up with rising home prices. In 2019 Vermonters at the median income level could afford about half of homes in the state; by 2024 that share had dropped to a third. In other words, most Vermonters cannot afford most homes in the state. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines unaffordable housing as costing more than 30 percent of household income.

Two workers earning minimum wage will not be able to afford a standard two-bedroom apartment in the biggest metro areas in any New England state in 2026. In Vermont, the difference between their income and rent in 2026 will be more than $25,000 annually, or $6 more income hourly per earner. That’s both because the Vermont minimum wage has fallen behind the other states (except New Hampshire, where the wage is tied to the federal minimum wage) and because rents have risen. In the last five years the median rent has increased by 35 percent, more than $300 per month. More than 40 percent of units cost over $1,500 per month in 2024, compared with 15 percent in 2019. 

While energy costs have come down from their 2022 peak, they’re higher than in 2021. A Vermont household with two vehicles and using fuel oil to heat their home spent over $1,200 more in 2024 than in 2021. The volatility in energy prices, particularly for fossil fuels, makes it hard for Vermonters to predict their bills from month to month and year to year. Changing federal policies, such as weakening efficiency standards and the ending of tax credits for electric vehicles, as well as the elimination of many grants for climate infrastructure, make it harder to invest in sustainable and more durably affordable energy.

Federal policy changes will make healthcare more expensive or entirely unaffordable for thousands of Vermonters. More than 30,000 Vermonters get health coverage on the state’s Affordable Care Act exchange, most with help from federal tax credits, which reduced Vermonters’ insurance premiums by $350 million in 2025. Of that, $65 million came from the enhanced premium tax credits set to expire at the end of 2025. Vermont has some of the highest healthcare costs in the country, and the loss of those credits will likely put health insurance out of reach for many Vermonters.

In addition to the pending loss of the enhanced tax credits, states are facing significant cuts to Medicaid under the reconciliation bill Congress passed in July, amounting to the loss of hundreds of millions of federal dollars to Vermont’s budget each year. More than 170,000 Vermonters across the state are covered through Medicaid, and estimates suggest 10 percent could lose healthcare.

Vermont’s total labor force has returned to its pre-Covid baseline. Roughly the same share of Vermonters, across age groups, are participating in the workforce as in 2019. More Vermonters are unemployed than in 2019, but the joblessness rate remained low, at under 3 percent in September 2025. More recent state jobs data were delayed because of the federal government shutdown. Some workers are experiencing more job uncertainty this year: The state’s roughly 6,600 federal workers—1.9 percent of the total workforce—remain at risk of layoff.

Vermont is one of only four states where the number of jobs has not returned to pre-Covid levels. In August 2025, there were 2,400 fewer jobs in the state than in January 2020 and nearly 5,000 fewer than the record set in March 2019.

After a decade of stagnation, beginning in 2014 real median household income has grown in Vermont and the rest of New England. Adjusted for inflation, Vermont’s household income was nearly $83,000 in 2024, up from $72,000 a decade earlier. But most of the growth occurred in the first half of that period: Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island have lost ground since 2019, while growth in the other states has slowed. The U.S. as a whole saw faster growth over the period, but most of it came between 2014 and 2019.

Most Vermont workers’ pay has not kept pace with the growth of their output. From 2000 to 2024, productivity grew 47 percent in Vermont. But compensation for production and nonsupervisory workers, who make up about 80 percent of the workforce, rose by just 34 percent. Vermont is doing better than many other states: U.S. productivity grew 45 percent from 2000 to 2024, but compensation grew less than half as fast nationally—only 21 percent. As a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute explains, the gap between compensation and productivity has widened in recent decades because more of the gains have flowed to corporate profits, executives, and shareholders. If wages had kept up with productivity over the last 25 years, Vermont workers would be making $3.12 more per hour—or $6,500 per year—than they are.

While real hourly wages have grown faster at the bottom over the last decade, the increase doesn’t add up to as big a gain in dollars as that at the top. Gains for the 90th percentile yielded an additional $18,000 per year, while those at the bottom brought in a third as much.

Vermont’s state and local tax system is less regressive than most states’, but middle-income Vermonters still pay a bigger share in taxes than the richest. Vermonters pay taxes in three big categories: on income, consumption, and property. The state income tax is progressive (higher-income Vermonters pay a bigger share of their income), while the sales tax is regressive—it takes a bigger bite out of lower-income people’s budgets. Property taxes are progressive up to the middle level of income and become regressive at the high end.