In 2025, 24.0% of people in Canada lived in a food-insecure household. That amounts to approximately 9.8 million people, including 2.4 million children, living in households that struggled to afford the food they need.
This is the first year with a small decline in the percentage of people living in food-insecure households, after three consecutive increases.
This week, Statistics Canada released data from the 2024 Canadian Income Survey. While the CIS 2024 provides information on income and poverty using 2024 tax files, hence its name, questions about food insecurity were asked in the following year, from January 19, 2025 to July 7, 2025.
Since food insecurity status is determined by the report of food deprivation in the past 12 months, we think it is more appropriate to characterize the food insecurity statistics as representative of 2025.
The data on the percentage and number of people living in food-insecure householdsa summarized in this post comes from Statistics Canada’s public data tables. Links to these tables are available in the graphs below.
Statistics Canada now releases food insecurity data for all provinces and territories. The national estimates presented in this post comprise the provinces and territories in all CIS cycles, but previously published “national estimates” only included the ten provinces. Due to data quality concerns, detailed breakdown by level of severity or selected demographic characteristics for the territories is unavailable. Caution needs to be taken when comparing territorial estimates from one year to the next due to relatively small sample sizes in the territories.
Food insecurity in Canada, 2025
Food insecurity remains a large and persistent problem in Canada. Despite a small decrease in the percentage of people living in food-insecure households between 2024 and 2025, the estimates for 2025 are still among the highest observed in the twenty years of monitoring. The persistently high prevalence of household food insecurity across Canada highlights the need for more effective, evidence-based policy responses by federal, provincial, and territorial governments.
Statistics Canada measures food insecurity using the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM), which consists of 18 questions about experiences of food deprivation over the past 12 months. These experiences range in severity from worrying about running out of food to going whole days without eating, all due to financial constraints.
Based on a household’s experience, they can be considered food secure or in one of 3 categories of food insecurity:
Marginal food insecurity: Worry about running out of food and/or limited food selection due to a lack of money for food.
Moderate food insecurity: Compromise in quality and/or quantity of food due to a lack of money for food.
Severe food insecurity: Miss meals, reduce food intake, and at the most extreme go day(s) without food.
Living in a food-insecure household means living in pervasive material deprivation with compromises to basic needs beyond just food.
The percentage of people in households experiencing food insecurity decreased from 25.7% in 2024 to 24.0% in 2025, representing a 1.7 percentage point decline. The decrease was greater among those in households experiencing marginal food insecurity compared to those in households experiencing moderate or severe food insecurity.
The persistence of more severe experiences of food insecurity in Canada is very concerning. The negative health outcomes and increased health care needs associated with food insecurity are graded, with those in severely food-insecure household more likely to have chronic physical and mental health problems, require healthcare services like hospitalization, and die prematurely.
Differences across the provinces and territories
The percentage of people living in food-insecure households was highest in Nunavut at 56.4%. Among the ten provinces, the percentage of individuals living in food-insecure households was highest in Alberta at 28.4%, New Brunswick at 28.2%, and Manitoba at 27.9%. The percentage was lowest in Yukon at 15.5%, Northwest Territories at 16.4%c, and Quebec at 18.0%.
In 2025, the percentage of people living in moderately food-insecure households ranged from 8.0% in Quebec to 15.2% in Manitoba. The percentage of those living in severely food-insecure households varied from 4.1% in Quebec to 9.4% in Alberta. Among the ten provinces, Quebec continues to stand out as having the lowest percentage of people living in food-insecure households and severely food-insecure households.
Food insecurity over time
In 2025, the percentage of people living food-insecure households declined in all provinces and territories, except Manitoba. Some of these changes may not be statistically significant, but information on confidence intervals is currently unavailable. Research is needed to better understand the nature of these changes.
Children living in food-insecure households, 2025
The chance of someone living in a food-insecure household differs greatly depending on their age. It has long been documented that children under 18 and working age adults have considerably higher proportions of people living in food-insecure households, compared to seniors 65 years and older. The percentage of children living in food-insecure households is more than double the percentage for seniors.
In 2025, nearly a third of children under 18 in Canada (30.8%) lived in a food-insecure household. That amounts to almost 2.4 million children, which represents 118,000 fewer children compared to 2024. The largest decline from 2024 to 2025 was among children living in marginally food-insecure households. In 2025, a bit more than three quarters (78%) of children living in food-insecure households, nearly 1.9 million children, were in moderately or severely food-insecure households.
The percentage of children living in food-insecure households was highest in Nunavut at 67.6%, New Brunswick at 38.1%, and Saskatchewan at 36.2%.
In 2025, food insecurity affected 29.4% of people in families with childrenb. Women+ lone-parent familiesd are very likely to be food-insecure, with nearly half (47.4%) of people in these families affected.
The decline in the percentage of people living in food-insecure households between 2024 and 2025 was largest among people in senior familiese (12.9% in 2024 and 9.9% in 2025) compared to people in non-senior familiese (27.9% in 2024 and 26.6% in 2025), senior unattached individuals (14.3% in 2024 and 13.0% in 2025), and non-senior unattached individuals (31.8% in 2024 and 30.4% in 2025).
Food insecurity and race
Food insecurity is racialized. The highest percentage of individuals living in food-insecure households in 2025 was found among Black people at 41.3%, Arab people at 36.6%, and Indigenous Peoples living off-reserve at 34.7%.
The situation for Indigenous communities is likely even worse given the lack of representation of people living on First Nations reserves and some remote Northern communities in the national surveys used to monitor food insecurity in Canada, as well as the lack of data on the territories in these estimates.
Food insecurity remains a very large problem. All the research point to the need to provide lower-income non-senior households with more adequate and secure incomes.
These new statistics continue to sound the alarm for policy actions to improve the financial circumstances of vulnerable households and address household food insecurity, whether by improving the existing programs that make up our social safety net (i.e. Canada Child Benefit, Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, Canada Workers Benefit, Employment Insurance, and provincial social assistance and child benefits, etc.), or implementing new ones like a basic income.
Notes
a. The estimates reported in this blog and the Statistics Canada resources cited should not be compared to estimates from the PROOF annual reports. In those reports, we present estimates of food insecurity at the household level, in line with the conceptualization of food insecurity as a household measure. In this post and most Statistics Canada resources, food insecurity is reported at the person-level, i.e. the percentage of people in food-insecure households. Previously published estimates on the PROOF website may also differ from the estimates presented in the current post due to updates to Statistics Canada’s public data tables to include the territories, where possible, and to revise estimates from the CIS 2018 to 2013 to incorporate the latest information from the 2021 Census of Population. More information about these changes are described in “The Daily – Canadian Income Survey, 2024“.
b. The statistics regarding families with children include people in couple families with children and in one-parent families with the main income earners under 65 years of age. They exclude families with main income earners 65 years or older that comprise children and other family types where there are only children of relatives of the main income earner. ‘Economic family’ is defined by Statistics Canada as a group of two or more persons who live in the same dwelling and are related to each other by blood, marriage, common law, adoption, or a foster relationship, with the main income earner (highest income before tax) serving as the reference point. A female lone parent family may have other family members and their children in it. This categorization and definition of economic family is not a decision by PROOF and is a function of how the available data is organized in Statistics Canada’s public data tables.
c. Use this estimate with caution due to data quality concerns.
d. Women+ include people who identified as woman and some who identified as non-binary based on gender information collected in the CIS since 2021. Statistics Canada’s public data tables aggreagate the data into a two-category gender variable (women+ or men+) to protect confidentiality.
e. Senior families include families with main income earners 65 years or older, while non-senior families include families with main income earners less than 65 years.
There may be some minor differences in the provincial estimates of overall food insecurity in different graphs due to rounding.
