Benefits Cliffs

One person helping another person up a mountain

Benefits Cliffs occur when slight increases in earnings disqualify low-wage workers from public assistance programs, hampering their financial independence and career advancement.

Our Community Development team provides information and tools to help Fifth District policymakers and organizations improve workers' long-term financial outlook.

Learn More About Our Efforts

Blog Post

January 27, 2022

Regional Matters

Rural Spotlight: Resuscitating the Health Care Workforce Pipeline in the Valleys

Tiffany Hollin-Wright and Jessica King

The GoodCare Program in Virginia helps aspiring workers complete career pathways in health care, addressing workforce shortages in a sector essential to equitable pandemic recovery.

Article

Second/Third Quarter 2021

Econ Focus

Benefits Cliffs

Neeraja Deshpande

The Richmond Fed has been working to educate policymakers and workers in the Fifth District about benefits cliffs

Podcast

Jan. 13, 2021

Speaking of the Economy

The Benefits Cliff: Keeping Working Families From Falling Off the Edge

Tiffany Hollin-Wright and Erika Bell explain "benefits cliffs" ― when workers receiving public assistance earn a raise and then are disqualified from receiving government help.

Research and Resources

Speech

Mother helping her daughters with remote school work

Oct. 21, 2021

What’s Sidelining Women?

Tom Barkin
President, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

President Tom Barkin discusses how we can connect more women with employment.

Speech

Close-up of two pairs of feet on opposite sides of a line in the road

Oct. 19, 2021

What’s Sidelining Workers?

Tom Barkin
President, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

President Tom Barkin talks about who is on the sidelines of the labor market, what’s keeping them there, and how we can remove barriers in their way.

Online Course

March 20, 2020

Invest In What's Next: Life After High School

A free, online course that helps students decide what path to pursue after high school.

Grade Level: High School
Resource Type: Online Course

Demo the CLIFF Tools

As part of our efforts to help address benefits cliffs across the Fifth District, the Richmond Fed has partnered with the Atlanta Fed to use Atlanta's CLIFF tools, a suite of digital resources that showcase the loss of public assistance a worker might face with an increase in income, and the simultaneous gap in financial resources this causes. The CLIFF tools also facilitate the simulation of policy and programmatic solutions.

Learn more about the tools by viewing the demo version of the CLIFF Dashboard and the demo version of the CLIFF Planner on the Atlanta Fed's CLIFFs tools webpage.

Our Partners

These organizations have signed Memorandums of Understanding with the Richmond Fed to access the CLIFF Dashboard and to use this tool to help their citizens and clients determine how best to achieve and sustain financial well-being.

Goodwill Industries of Southern Piedmont

The Virginia Goodwill Network ( VGN) is a consortium of five regional Goodwill organizations that provide collaborative workforce development programs and services to tens of thousands of Virginians each year.

This includes: