MONROVIA — Average incomes in Liberia are recovering, but slowly. Real gross domestic product per capita rose about 2.4% in 2025 and is up roughly 12.5% from its 2020 pandemic-era low, yet it still sits just below where it stood in 2018, according to the Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services (LISGIS) via the Central Bank of Liberia.
GDP per capita — total output divided by the population — is the single best summary of whether ordinary living standards are improving. It strips out the effect of a growing population from headline growth, and on that measure Liberia has clawed back most, but not all, of the ground lost since 2018.
The gap between headline growth and per-capita gains is the crucial story. The economy grew about 4.6% in 2025, but with a population expanding well over 2% a year, much of that growth is absorbed simply by there being more people to share it among. Real output per person rose only about 2.4%.
That arithmetic is why headline growth, however strong, does not automatically translate into rising living standards. An economy must grow faster than its population, year after year, for incomes per person to rise meaningfully — and Liberia's young, fast-growing population sets a high bar.
The composition of growth compounds the challenge. Output has been led by capital-intensive mining that employs relatively few people, while agriculture, which occupies most of the workforce, grew slowly. Growth concentrated away from where people work limits how much the per-capita gain is felt in daily life.
Still, the direction is positive. Per-capita income has risen every year since 2020, recovering from a low of about 599.6 in the constant-price index toward the 674.5 of 2025, approaching the 677.4 of 2018. Sustained, that trend would slowly raise living standards.
The denominator is the challenge. LISGIS estimates Liberia's population at well over five million and growing more than 2% a year, which means the economy must add that much output annually just to stand still in per-person terms. Sustaining growth comfortably above the population rate, year after year, is the only path to incomes that rise rather than tread water.
What to watch is whether growth stays well above the population growth rate, whether it spreads into job-rich sectors, and whether per-capita income finally clears its pre-pandemic peak in 2026.
