AN INDEPENDENT RECORD OF EVERY PROMISE MADE IN THE STATES OF JERSEY
Visit the Guernsey edition →Jersey · Living standards · 2009/10–2021/22
21% of the population lived below 60% of median income after housing costs in 2009/10, rising to 27% by 2019/20 and easing to 24% in 2021/22 - a fall from the peak, but still 3 points above where the series began. Four survey waves across thirteen years, not an annual run.
Four survey waves, not an annual run
The share of the population living below 60% of median equivalised income after housing costs, from the States of Jersey's Income Distribution Survey.
Below 60% of median income after housing costs, 2009/10 to 2021/22
Four points across thirteen years, not a dense run. The rate rose 6 points from 2009/10 to its 2019/20 peak, then fell 3 points to 24% in 2021/22 - a genuine improvement on the peak, and still 3 points above where the series began. Because the survey runs roughly every five years rather than annually, there is no reading on what happened in the gap years between waves, and no basis for assuming the change moved in a straight line between them.
The after-housing-costs Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality across the whole income distribution rather than just the share below one threshold, moved from 0.39 in 2009/10 to 0.43 in 2021/22 - only two waves carry a directly comparable calculation, so this is a two-point comparison, not a trend line.
States of Jersey, Income Distribution Survey. Measured after housing costs and equivalised for household size. Four waves: 2009/10, 2014/15, 2019/20, 2021/22. Unlike Guernsey’s Indicators of Poverty Report, this is not an annual publication.
Two different measures, not one homelessness number
Jersey publishes two separate measures here, kept apart rather than combined into one figure: a quarterly homelessness report, newer and more frequent than Guernsey's own housing-insecurity series but only two quarters old, and a point-in-time count of the Affordable Housing Gateway's banded waiting list.
Homelessness services, 2024 Q3 and 2025 Q1
| Measure | 2024 Q3 | 2025 Q1 |
|---|---|---|
| Service visits | 265 | 321 |
| People | 246 | 304 |
| Houseless | 201 | 253 |
| In insecure housing | 45 | 32 |
People recorded houseless rose by 52 between these two quarters, while those in insecure housing (at risk, not yet houseless) fell by 13. That could mean people moving from at-risk into houselessness, or it could be noise in a two-point series - with a gap in the published run between them and no Q4 2024 or Q2 2025 reading, there is not enough here to tell the two apart. The ministerial statement introducing this series itself cautions against reading a trend into it this early, and this page follows that caution rather than overriding it.
Affordable Housing Gateway waiting list, as at March 2022
This is a point-in-time administrative count, not a published back-series. Checked Statistics Jersey’s open-data catalogue for a structured resource under “housing gateway”, “waiting list” and “affordable housing” - the only match was the unrelated Housing Affordability Index (a house-price-to-income measure). No standing open-data series exists for this waiting list, so the figures above are press-sourced rather than pulled from a dataset, and are dated by the two different points the underlying answers used.
Homelessness: gov.je, “Homelessness in Jersey” quarterly report. Waiting list: Affordable Housing Gateway figures via States Assembly written answers and gov.je reporting, not a standing open-data resource.
Closest available proxy, not a matching instrument
Jersey has no Food Foundation three-item survey module. The closest published figure is the Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey's material-deprivation question: the share of households who went without at least one essential - food, heating or clothing - in the past year.
Went without an essential in the past year, 2017 to 2025
Flat at 34% across the first two waves, then up to a peak of 43% in 2023 before easing slightly to 41% in 2025 - still well above the 2017/2022 plateau.
A different instrument, not a matching one.This question asks about going without money, heating, food or clothing in general - it does not isolate food the way Guernsey’s Food Foundation three-item scale does. Setting this figure directly alongside Guernsey’s 13.9% food-insecurity headline would compare two different questions wearing the same units. The narrower item nested in the same JOLS module - unable to afford a cooked meal every day - moved from 13% in 2023 to 15% in 2025, a change of +2points across the only two waves that carry it, and is the closer (though still not equivalent) comparator to Guernsey’s skipped-meals figure.
Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey, material-deprivation module. Presented as the closest available proxy for food insecurity Jersey publishes, not as an equivalent measure to Guernsey’s Food Foundation three-item instrument.
The one genuine gap
There is no chart here, and that is the finding. No official statistic exists, neither operating charity publishes a series of its own, and the figures that do circulate arrive through local press or a charity's own reporting in units that cannot be put on the same axis.
1,040
Salvation Army food parcels, 2021
3,802
Salvation Army food parcels, 2024
~200
St Vincent de Paul / Caritas Jersey families, early 2022
640+
St Vincent de Paul / Caritas Jersey families, 2025
2% (12% of single-parent households)
JOLS 2023: households using charity food support
These figures must not be chained into a series. They come from two different charities, counted in incompatible units - Salvation Army food parcels, St Vincent de Paul / Caritas Jersey families supported, and a JOLS survey percentage each answer a different question. A parcel count and a households-surveyed percentage cannot be plotted on the same axis, and neither charity publishes a standing series of its own that would let the individual figures above be read as one trend.
What would close the gap is a single published series on one basis, at a stated frequency, from either charity or from the States. Until that exists, these figures are usable individually, with their date and source attached, and not otherwise - the same position Guernsey’s own page takes on its own food-bank figures.
Two comparable waves - a single item, not a scale
The Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey carries one self-report loneliness question, not Guernsey's multi-item De Jong Gierveld scale. Two comparable waves exist: 2022 and 2023.
30%
Feel lonely often or all the time, 2022.
25%
Same question, 2023 (-5 points).
A single self-report question is a cruder instrument than a validated multi-item scale. Guernsey’s Wellbeing Survey uses the De Jong Gierveld scale and found its headline fell while several sub-scales rose - a divergence only visible because multiple items were asked. Jersey’s single item cannot be checked against sub-scales the same way, because there are none: this fall from 30% to 25% is everything the instrument measures, not a headline that could be hiding a more complicated picture underneath, and it should be read as a narrower, less complete proxy for the same underlying question rather than a like-for-like comparator.
Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey, single-item self-report loneliness question. Two comparable waves only: 2022 and 2023.
Sources for this page: Income Distribution Survey; Homelessness in Jersey, quarterly report; Jersey Opinions and Lifestyle Survey. Each figure is dated by the period it measures. Where a measure uses a different instrument from its Guernsey counterpart, or has only a single reading or a two-point comparison, that is stated beside it rather than smoothed over.