The government says poverty fell to a record-low 9.7 percent in 2025, but the number comes with a question that is harder to answer: How much does a Filipino actually need to survive?

The Philippine Statistics Authority’s poverty threshold of P35,121 per person a year amounts to only P2,927 a month or P96 a day. For a family of five, the threshold is about P14,634 a month, or roughly P488 a day.

That is the statistical line separating the poor from everyone else.

But P96 a day is hardly a measure of what it costs to live a decent life. It is the amount the PSA estimates is necessary to meet what it calls minimum basic food and non-food requirements.

The problem begins with how those requirements are calculated.

The food component is based on a low-cost food bundle designed to meet specified nutritional requirements. It is subjected to a least-cost test, meaning the methodology seeks the cheapest combination of locally available food that meets the prescribed standards.

For a Filipino family struggling with food prices, however, “least cost” is not necessarily the same as adequate. The non-food component raises an even bigger concern.

Instead of pricing a contemporary basket covering actual rent, electricity, transportation, health care, education, clothing and other necessities, the methodology derives non-food spending from the spending patterns of a reference group.

Part of that formula rests on expenditure data from 2000, 2003, 2006 and 2009. The country has changed dramatically since then.

Housing, transportation, utilities, health care and education have become more expensive. Mobile connectivity has become practically indispensable.

Families face expenses that were either smaller or far less common when much of the underlying data was collected.

Yet the poverty threshold remains extraordinarily austere.

This is why the issue is bigger than whether the PSA’s 9.7-percent poverty rate is mathematically correct.

A person earning just above P96 a day may be officially out of poverty while remaining unable to afford nutritious food, decent shelter, medical care or a child’s education.

They are not counted as poor. They are simply counted as not poor enough. The figures expose the weakness of defining poverty by the cheapest possible survival basket.

For millions of Filipinos, poverty is not merely the inability to cross an official statistical line. It is the daily calculation of which necessity to sacrifice when the money runs out.

The real question, then, is not how many Filipinos are surviving with less than P96 a day. It is how many can actually live on what comes above it.