Hundreds of thousands of parents in the UK are more than £20,000 below the annual income needed for a decent living standard, new research has warned.
High housing costs and restricted benefit allowances are causing the gap between household finances and living costs to widen, according to new findings from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
The charity’s Minimum Income Standard report, published with Loughborough University, calculates the lowest budget required for households to “live with dignity in the UK”.
For a lone parent with two children working full-time on the national living wage, this income covers just 67 per cent of the required minimum on average – a shortfall of more than £22,000.
Around 340,000 single parents in the UK are on an income equivalent to or below this level.
Meanwhile, a couple with two children with both parents working full-time on the same minimum wage rate reaches 80 per cent of the threshold, for a shortfall of around £15,000.
The picture becomes more stark for those on out-of-work benefits, providing less than a quarter (24 per cent) of the income required for households without children. This rises to 28 per cent for couple parents and 36 per cent for lone parents.
The JRF says that it has revised its figures in light of the UK’s housing situation. For the first time in the study’s 18-year history, focus group participants told researchers that it is no longer reasonable to assume low-income households can access social housing due to long-term shortages and waiting lists.
This has pushed up the minimum income levels, the report adds, owing to the much higher rental costs seen in the private sector.
A lone parent with two children in private rented housing would need £67,000 to reach the level, compared to £59,800 in social housing – an increase of £8,000.
Meanwhile, a single pensioner with the state pension as their only income would need £21,300 as a private renter, £5,000 more than the £15,900 in social housing. The full state pension is worth £12,547 a year.
Darren Baxter, housing lead at the JRF, said: “We are no longer living in a world where privately rented homes are a temporary pit stop for young, single professionals. They’re now the homes where families are bringing up their children, from babies to teenagers, as well as where people are growing old. But the eye-watering rents that people are paying are denying them the stable foundation they need for a good life.
“Families can’t wait the decades it will take for the new homes currently being built to have an impact on their rents – their children will be adults by then.”
The charity argues that the issue of expensive private rentals evidences the need for a rent cap in the UK, a policy that the government has indicated it will not pursue.
Average rental costs for new tenancies were up 2.6 per cent in the year to July 2026, property website Zoopla found this month.
Its researchers have forecast that this will rise to 4 or 5 per cent by the end of the year, as a slowdown in rental costs begins to falter.
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