WASHINGTON — A decade after the financial crisis, American families are finally climbing out of the deep trough created by the Great Recession.
Median American household income reached $61,372 in 2017, according to the Census Bureau, which described that level as statistically indistinguishable from where it was in 2007.
The numbers released on Wednesday show that the American middle class suffered a “lost decade” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, as median household income fell sharply, and then began a slow recovery.
But the gains have not been equally felt and the numbers revealed a sharp divergence between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else. The incomes of the nation’s most affluent households have climbed sharply since the crisis, driven largely by investment gains. The Census Bureau said income inequality did not rise significantly last year.
The steady growth of the American economy has produced broad gains for the last few years. The 2017 report marked the third straight year that income has increased while poverty has declined.
Median household income rose by 1.8 percent in 2017, following gains of 3.2 percent in 2016 and 5.2 percent in 2015.
The Census Bureau made significant methodological changes in 2013, complicating comparisons with earlier years, but officials said that the level of median household income in 2017 was roughly the same as in 2007, the last full year before the financial crisis.
The Trump administration declared in July that the government’s long-running effort to reduce poverty in the United States “is largely over and a success.” The Census Bureau, by contrast, reported that 12.3 percent of American households lived in poverty in 2017 — about 39.7 million people.
That was an improvement over 2016, when the poverty rate stood at 12.7 percent.
The data also showed the share of Americans covered by health insurance remained stable. The Census Bureau reported that 8.8 percent of the population, or 28.5 million people, lacked health insurance for the full year. The change from 2016 was not statistically significant for either number.
But turmoil in health insurance markets last year, as Congress considered numerous proposals to repeal the Affordable Care Act, may have had some effect.
“Between 2016 and 2017, we saw that the uninsured rate decreased in three states, and it increased in 14 states,” said Edward Berchick, a demographer at the Census Bureau. “This was the first time since 2013 that we saw an increase in any state.”
Major provisions of the Affordable Care Act expanding coverage took effect in 2014.
The bureau reported significant differences in insurance coverage rates depending on whether states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
In states that chose to expand Medicaid, it said, 9.4 percent of people age 19 to 64 had no health insurance coverage at any time last year, not statistically different from the percentage in 2016. By contrast, in states that did not expand Medicaid, 16.7 percent of the population had no health insurance coverage in 2017, up from 16.1 percent in 2016.
In both expansion states and non-expansion states, the uninsured rate for working-age adults was lower in 2017 than in 2013, before the federal government began subsidizing private insurance and paying for the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
Follow Binyamin Appelbaum on Twitter @bcappelbaum.