Since 1968, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has collected economic, demographic, and social data on a national sample of the U.S. population. The PSID was established to examine the dynamics of economic life, particularly dynamics in poverty status. As a result, the PSID has been widely used by poverty researchers, with 390 publications on “poverty” listed in the PSID bibliography as of October 2007. This paper has two goals: to guide researchers through the process of calculating the poverty rate from the PSID for each year from 1968 to the present; and to compare the level and trend in PSID poverty rates to that of the official Census Bureau rates that are based on the March Current Population Survey (CPS).