How labor poverty is moving in Colombia

TAPIL and IGIL, updated every month

Colombia’s official poverty figure comes out once a year, months late. Our indicators show every month which way it is moving, by looking at what people earn from work.

In short. TAPIL is the share of Colombians living in households where what they earn from work is not enough to clear the poverty line. IGIL measures how unequally that income is shared: 0 would mean everyone earns the same, 1 that a single person takes it all.

For anyone deciding whether to scale a program, whom to prioritize or how to respond to a rise in prices, waiting a year for the official figure is too long. These indicators exist so you do not have to wait.

What they measure

TAPIL — labor income poverty rate (Tasa de Pobreza por Ingresos Laborales). What share of the population falls below the poverty line counting only income from work. It answers whether the labor market, on its own, is pulling people out of poverty.

IGIL — labor income Gini index (Índice de Gini por Ingresos Laborales). How concentrated labor income is. The two are read together: TAPIL says how many people are left below, IGIL says how what exists is distributed. A labor market can reduce poverty and concentrate income at the same time, and that combination is exactly what public policy needs to see early.

How they are built

  • Sources. Microdata from the monthly labor force module of Colombia’s Gran Encuesta Integrada de Hogares (GEIH, the national household survey), run by DANE.
  • What they include, and what they do not. Labor income only: no pensions, no transfers, no imputed rent. That is precisely why they can be computed monthly, because the official poverty measure is annual exactly because it does include them.
  • Frequency. Monthly for the national total. Domains with smaller samples, such as urban centers or rural areas, are published at the frequency their sample size allows.
  • Method. DANE’s official poverty lines applied by geographic domain, to household per capita labor income, weighted by person. Until DANE publishes the lines for the current year, an estimated line is used for each domain, and that year’s figures are marked preliminary.
  • Traceability. Every release is reproducible from source data: no figure is written by hand, and every published number has a versioned program behind it.

TAPIL is not DANE’s official monetary poverty rate, and does not replace it. It measures something narrower, only income from work, on the same 0 to 100 % scale. Its purpose is to show where poverty is heading in the months when there is no official figure.

Latest release

July 2026 — national TAPIL 40.4 %. 21.3 million people live in households whose per capita labor income falls below the moderate poverty line. Against the extreme poverty line the figure is 22.3 %. IGIL stood at 0.590.

Released on September 29, 2026. Source: GEIH (DANE), Kappa calculations. The 2026 figures, dotted, are preliminary: they use an estimated poverty line. The series jumps in January and July, when the poverty lines are updated. The figure and the chart are generated at build time from the versioned series: neither is written by hand.

Methodology and code

Each release is published in three versions: one for a general audience, on LinkedIn; one for analysts and journalists, on Substack; and a technical note for researchers working with the same microdata. All three read the same validated figures, and the technical note documents the full method. The technical note is available on request during its first 90 days; see Resources. Every quarter we also publish city notes, using the same method, for the main metropolitan areas. Releases are published in Spanish.

Our commitment is that every figure can be traced back to the data and the program that produced it.

Get the indicator every month

One release a month, with the figure, the chart and what it implies for public policy. We do not promise a fixed day: each release comes out once DANE publishes the month’s microdata and the calculation passes its quality checks. Releases are in Spanish.

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Client versions

We adapt these indicators to a specific client question: other populations, other territories, other countries, or integration with their own administrative records. If that is useful to you, write to us.