A two-decade view of household income in Pakistan: progress, reversal, and perspective.

Looking at household income in USD terms over the last 20 years tells a more nuanced story than simple optimism or pessimism.

Between 2005 and 2015, Pakistan actually did reasonably well. Average household income in dollar terms rose by about 67%, equivalent to roughly 5.3% annual growth. This was a period when growth, relative currency stability, and remittance inflows translated into real gains in global purchasing power.

The story changes sharply after 2015.

From 2015 to 2025, average household income in USD fell by around 16%, or about –1.7% per year. In other words, the last decade effectively gave back a quarter of the gains made in the previous one.

Taken together, the net change over 20 years is still positive — about +40% in USD terms, or roughly 1.7% per year. That means living standards did improve over the long run. But the trajectory matters: we did well in the first decade and poorly in the second.

The takeaway is not that nothing changed — it clearly did.

The takeaway is that we could have done much better, especially in the past ten years. Stronger macro stability, productivity growth, and export performance could have preserved and built on earlier gains instead of eroding them.

A two-decade lens reminds us of two things at once:
Progress is possible — we’ve seen it.
Progress is fragile — and easy to reverse.

The challenge now is not to dismiss the past, but to recover what was lost and do better in the decade ahead.

Data conversions done on Pakistan Bureau of Statistics HIES data.