Guaranteed income

Before making investments in this strategy, city and county leaders should ensure this strategy addresses local needs.

The Urban Institute and Mathematica have developed indicator frameworks to help local leaders assess conditions related to upward mobility, identify barriers, and guide investments to address these challenges. These indicator frameworks can serve as a starting point for self-assessment, not as a comprehensive evaluation, and should be complemented by other forms of local knowledge.

The Urban Institute's Upward Mobility Framework identifies a set of key local conditions that shape communities’ ability to advance upward mobility and racial equity. Local leaders can use the Upward Mobility Framework to better understand the factors that improve upward mobility and prioritize areas of focus. Data reports for cities and counties can be created here.

Several indicators in the Upward Mobility Framework may be improved with investments in guaranteed income. To measure these indicators and determine if investments in these interventions could help, examine the following:

• Opportunities for income: Household income at 20th, 50th, and 80th percentiles. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Financial security: Share of households with debt in collections. These data are available from the Urban Institute’s Debt in America website.

• Opportunities for wealth-building: Ratio of the share of a community’s housing wealth held by a racial or ethnic group to the share of households of the same group. These data are available from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

• Establish a clear, shared purpose and target population: Guaranteed income is a flexible policy tool, but its effectiveness depends on clear goals and intentional design. While it can be used to broadly support low-income residents, experts suggest programs may be more likely to demonstrate measurable success when they focus on a defined population and specific outcomes, such as supporting individuals during key life transitions, including new mothers, domestic violence survivors, returning citizens, or youth aging out of foster care.

• Setting dosage, frequency, and duration of the guaranteed income: Determining how much cash to provide, how often, and for how long are foundational design choices that must reflect the program’s intended outcomes and local context. While lower cash amounts may allow for broader reach, insufficient support risks limiting impact. Similarly, variations in payment structure and duration can shape how participants plan and make decisions. These choices should be grounded in relevant evidence and co-designed with individuals who have lived experience and deep ties to the communities being served. A guaranteed income trial in Compton, California compared the effects of quarterly and twice-monthly transfers on recipients. While the overall study found no significant differences in primary and secondary study outcomes, recipients of twice-monthly transfers were more likely to own a car, had lower credit card debt, and (marginally) greater food security than recipients of quarterly transfers. Experts emphasized that benefit design needs to be tailored to a program’s goals and local context.

• Plan for interactions with public benefits to protect participants: Anticipate and address how guaranteed income payments may affect eligibility for state and federal safety net programs. Jurisdictions should assess potential benefit disruptions early and pursue policy solutions (legislative waivers, regulatory adjustments, or participant screening) to prevent unintended harm to recipients.

• Select low-barrier and reliable disbursement methods: One of the most critical operational design components is structuring how the guaranteed income will be delivered to recipients. Some jurisdictions allow recipients a choice in how to receive a guaranteed income: transfers to bank accounts or reloadable physical debit cards. Program administrators need to track issues with payment processing and designate sufficient staffing capacity to help with troubleshooting and onboarding.

• Build in quantitative and qualitative program evaluation: Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of guaranteed income programs can be instrumental in demonstrating impact and maintaining support. Partnering early on with research partners can ensure that these research efforts are smoothly integrated into program operations and do not become barriers to implementation. Evidence mixed with personal narratives is powerful when discussing further investment or expansions of guaranteed income programs.

• Center community voice in program design: Ensure individuals with lived experience and those most directly impacted are meaningfully engaged in decisions around benefit amount, timing, and disbursement methods. Co-designing with community members increases relevance, trust, and fairness in implementation.

• Align evaluation with program delivery: Evaluation and research efforts must be structured to support, not hinder, the timely and effective delivery of benefits. Data collection should be minimally intrusive, prioritizing participant experience and operational excellence.

• Design inclusive outreach and access: Target outreach to historically underserved populations by partnering with trusted community-based organizations. Ensure accessibility for older adults, limited-English speakers, and others by providing non-digital options and language support.

• Minimize enrollment barriers: Reduce administrative burdens by streamlining application processes, limiting documentation requirements, and using trusted eligibility proxies where possible. Simplifying enrollment increases participation among those most in need and supports access for all. Allowing participants to complete applications without all eligibility information and creating the option for delayed verification can also increase accessibility. This approach also requires sufficient staff capacity to follow up with selected residents before transfers start.

• Residents with lived experience: Those with direct lived experience should have a strong voice in program design and implementation. The input of those who are representative of the target population can help shape the program to be relevant, respectful, and effective. Gathering the perspectives from the broader social and support system may also be helpful. For example, an education guaranteed pilot could include the high school seniors intended as participants, but also school principals, teachers, guidance counselors,

• Local community-based organizations: Community-based organizations often have a deep understanding of the local context, making them strong partners for outreach, support, and developing effective feedback loops.

• Local government: Local governments bring political authority, service infrastructure, and coordination capacity to support implementation at scale.

• Researchers: Researchers ensure rigorous evaluation and accountability, using data to measure impact, identify challenges, and inform policy.

• Philanthropy: Philanthropic organizations can provide early-stage funding, risk capital, and strategic guidance to launch and sustain pilots. They also help convene stakeholders and amplify the impact of successful models.

• Participants: Pilot participants can serve not just as beneficiaries but as co-creators of local programs, offering feedback that helps refine implementation.

• Legal advisors: Legal experts help navigate complex benefit interactions, ensure regulatory compliance, and anticipate unintended consequences. Their role is crucial in protecting participants and designing a legally sound pilot.

• Vendors: Vendors—including payment processors, data managers, and tech providers—enable smooth, secure, and scalable delivery of cash and infrastructure.

• Design programs alongside residents: Effective guaranteed income programs have spent significant time engaging with community members to guide program execution. This engagement can include frequent town halls, focus groups, and interviews with residents. Deep connections in the community can increase trust and engagement with the program. Some residents may initially reject a guaranteed income offer due to concerns of financial scams, which is another reason why investing time up-front in trust building is important.

• Prioritize data collection and transparency: To demonstrate program impact, collect extensive data from participants via surveys and expense tracking. Alongside this tracking, successful programs may create a resident advisory board, which can serve as an effective vehicle for answering questions from the public. For some residents, this type of transparency and ongoing engagement can increase comfort in participating.

• Preserve existing benefits: Because regular cash transfers may alter a recipient’s income status, implementing agencies must carefully design a strategy that ensures a recipient’s public benefits will not be impacted. This may include partnering with city, county, and/or state human service agencies to create waivers or launching a “hold harmless” fund to reimburse recipients in the event that other public benefits are reduced as a result of participating in the program.

• Devote resources to storytelling: To counteract prevailing narratives about unconditional cash transfers, consider devoting resources to a pool of recipients to publicly share stories of how cash transfers have impacted their lives, as well as leveraging validators (teachers, doctors, community leaders, etc.) who can reflect on the impacts they have noticed. This can help the program demonstrate how financial assistance is overwhelmingly used for essential items, like food, clothing, and utilities.

• Vet vendors and operations. Disbursement vendors are critical implementers in a guaranteed income program and must have strong operational capabilities. Recipients are often financially precarious and rely on money that arrives on time. Strong program administration is critical to test these systems in advance and include user testing to resolve potential complications. Implementers of guaranteed income pilots reflected that administrative costs are often underestimated for pilots, with this issue exacerbated by ambitious timelines that do not account for organizational limitations. Staffing models among potential partners are often not conducive to bulk, high-intensity workloads, leading to overtime costs—something to be considered ahead of time.

While the specific metrics used to evaluate a guaranteed income pilot should be tied to the program goals, the following are outcome categories implementers can consider:

• Economic stability & security: Consider tracking changes in participants' income volatility, ability to meet basic needs, debt reduction, and savings. Given that economic security is often a core focus of these programs, it tends to be an important measure.

• Employment & education: Consider monitoring changes in employment status, job quality, hours worked, and enrollment in education or training. This indicator is often closely watched by policymakers. Experts advised that evaluations should contextualize shifts in employment intensity and hours worked by observing how this time is reallocated. This could include looking at whether decreases in hours worked reflected increased time dedicated to parenting or caregiving.

• Health & well-being: Consider measuring physical and mental health indicators, healthcare utilization, and self-reported health status.

• Social & civic engagement: Consider assessing participants’ involvement in community activities, volunteerism, caregiving, and trust in institutions.

• Second generation and children's outcomes: Consider evaluating changes in children’s school attendance, academic performance, developmental milestones, and household stability.

• Subgroup analyses: Based on program goals, one can also look at outcomes by subpopulation, depending on data availability.